The role of the service concept in model-driven applications development

This paper identifies two paradigms that have influenced the design of distributed applications: the middleware-centred and the protocol-centred paradigm, and proposes a combined use of these two paradigms. This combined use incorporates major benefits from both paradigms: the ability to reuse middleware infrastructures and the ability to treat distributed coordination aspects as a separate object of design through the use of the service concept. A careful consideration of the service concept, and its recursive application, allows us to define an appropriate and precise notion of platform-independence that suits the needs of model-driven middleware application development