- Area collectively known as Web Services
- Providers expose “active” services on the Web
- documents are transferred to these services for processing
- results may be returned as documents, too
- Defines a document oriented distributed computing model
- reminescent of other models, e.g., distributed objects
- but not the same! E.g., there is no concept for object lifecycle
- the ubiquitous Web infrastructure is a key for deployment
- reminescent of other models, e.g., distributed objects