Service orientation in middleware components for scalable service marketplaces

The purpose of marketplaces in an economic sense is the offering of a venue for selling and buying goods. On the Internet, virtual marketplaces for trading goods have also been known since the 1990s. More recently, the marketplace idea has been extended towards the exchange of highly-specialised, custom services which are technically implemented as redistributable Web services. As opposed to tradable goods which are sold at a discrete point in time, the service marketplace retains its functionality beyond the purchase through continuous contracting and management of services. This additional activity increases the amount of required resources. For a scalable exchange between thousands of users, the underlying system and middleware thus needs to adhere to scalability principles known from service-oriented architectures. This paper confirms the idea of representing the middleware as a set of distributed platform services which can themselves be offered on service marketplaces.