A Survey on Coordination Middleware for XML-Centric Applications

This paper focuses on coordination middleware for distributed applicationsbased on active documents and XML technologies. First, the paperintroduces the main concepts underlying active documents and XML, andidentifies the strict relations between active documents and mobile agents(“document agents”). Then, the paper goes into details about the problemof defining a suitable middleware architecture to support coordination activitiesin applications including active documents and mobile agents, byspecifically focusing on the role played by XML technologies in that context.A simple taxonomy is introduced to characterize coordination middlewarearchitectures depending on the way they exploit XML documents insupporting coordination. The characteristics of several middleware infrastructuresare then surveyed and evaluated, also with the help of a simple example scenario in the area of distributed workflow management. Thisanalysis enables us to identify the advantages and the shortcomings of thedifferent approaches, and the basic requirements of a middleware for XMLcentricapplications.