ACM SIGSOFT impact paper award: reflections and prospects

In the mid 1990s the Internet began to emerge as a communication and application platform for the masses, enabled by infrastructures from CORBA to the World Wide Web. Consequently, software engineering researchers began to address the many challenges and opportunities of engineering large-scale, highly networked distributed systems. At the same time, the event-based or implicit invocation architectural style had established itself as a prominent feature of distributed systems, but primarily restricted to small-scale systems deployed in local-area networks.