- 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
- Call patterns can be defined for complex applications
- Remote procedure calls can also be described
- I/O parameters transferred as a special documents
- relies on appropriate conventions
- Area collectively known as Web Services
- reminescent of other models, e.g., distributed objects
- but not the same! E.g., there is no concept for object lifecycle
- the ubiquitous Web/Internet infrastructure is a key for deployment