State-of-the-Art Distributed Computing Infrastructures

This chapter surveys state-of-the-art distributed computing infrastructures (a.k.a. middleware platforms). Much prior work has focused on comparing platform X to platform Y (Chung et al., 1998; Katiyar, 1994; Raj, 1997; Lewandowski, 1998; Fatoohi et al., 1997), which is not our goal here. We rather aim at comparing and evaluating platforms with respect to the degree of transparency and the degree of resource control they offer to the application developer. In order to do this we briefly present the individual platforms.