Milan Milenkovic

The current implementation of the World Wide Web and its supporting Internet infrastructure is predominantly geared toward information retrieval and display in a humanly readable form. Its data formats and protocols are neither intended nor very suitable for automated machine-machine interactions without humans in the loop. Emerging uses of the Internet - including peer-to-peer and grid computing - provide both a glimpse of and the impetus for evolution of the Internet into a distributed computing platform of unprecedented scale. In this article I explore the needs and requirements of distributed computing on the Internet and present a case for a building-block approach that amalgamates and extends the foundation provided by standards-based Web services, peer-to-peer, and grid computing. I analyze the requirements of emerging and predicted modes of Internet distribu... (more)