Colombo: Lightweight middleware for service-oriented computing

Colombo is a lightweight platform for developing, deploying, and executing service-oriented applications. It provides optimized, native runtime support for the service-oriented-computing model, as opposed to the approach of layering service-oriented applications on a legacy runtime. This approach allows Colombo to provide high runtime performance, a small footprint, and simplified application development and deployment models. The Colombo runtime natively supports the full Web Services (WS) stack, providing transactional, reliable, and secure interactions among services. It defines a multilanguage service programming model that supports, among others, Java™ and Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) service composition, and offers a deployment and discovery model fully based on declarative service descriptions (Web Service Description Language [WSDL] and WS-Policy). In this paper we describe these and other aspects of the architecture, design principles, and capabilities of the Colombo platform. © Copyright 2005 by International Business Machines Corporation.