Toward Service Oriented Distributed Architectures

In the last few years, Internet has been adopted as a common access and communication instrument among users/resources, which are spread all over the world. Its success has led researchers and developers to define new mechanisms and technologies to develop and deploy software applications that best suit the Internet environment. In spite of their differences, these new solutions have several fundamental common characteristics: they provide support to develop dynamic and decentralized large-scale applications that have a loosely coupled architecture based on independent components, which interact among them to achieve common goals. This paper sustains the above by presenting three of the most representative and promising approaches: Web Service, Grid Computing, and the Peer-to-Peer paradigm. Further, the paper discusses the similarities and the differences among these solutions in the attempt to outline the new trends in the evolution of distributed systems.