Web federates - Towards a middleware for highly scalable peer-to-peer services

Starting from the classical Client/Server paradigm, in the last couple of years Peer-To-Peer approaches have evolved and proven their power. Currently we see an evolution from the distributed object access paradigm represented e.g. by middleware architectures like CORBA, DCOM or RMI towards Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), entailing a retrogression to the Client/Server paradigm. In this paper we want to present how Peer-To-Peer Applications can to a large extend benefit from intrinsic Web Service properties like loose coupling, declarative interface definition and interoperability, thus incorporating advantages from SOA and the Peer-To-Peer approach, opening new fields of application to both of them. For this purpose, WebFederate, a prototype middleware based on Microsoft's NET Framework has been implemented and will be presented in this paper.