Separating the concerns of distributed deployment and dynamic composition in internet application systems

The Internet is currently evolving from a global information network into a distributed application system. For example, some Internet applications are based on executing remote services which have been previously installed on possibly multiple Internet nodes, whereas parts of other Internet applications are dynamically moved from several remote nodes to be executed on a single node. In this paper, we focus on the related problem of how the parts of an Internet application that have been independently deployed on multiple Internet nodes can be transparently located, seamlessly retrieved and dynamically composed on a particular node by request. Vie propose a novel deployment and composition approach using so called modules and module federations and show how to separate the logical application composition from the physical module deployment. The realization of our proposal in Java and C++ is presented and the use of the approach in ongoing research projects is demonstrated.