(G. Mecca, M. Santomauro, D. Santoro, E. Veltri) Middleware-Oriented Government Interoperability Frameworks: A Comparison

Abstract: We discuss deployment solutions for e-Government Interoperability Frameworks (GIFs). We concentrate on middleware-oriented GIFs, i.e., those in which middleware modules act as intermediaries among information systems that need to exchange data and services. A prominent example is the Italian SPCoop interoperability framework. We review the SPCoop architecture, and two popular open-source implementations of its core modules, called OpenSPCoop and freESBee. We argue that the comparison of these two solutions is relevant since they obey to radically different philosophies, both in terms of the relationship to the underlying J2EE container, and of their internal module organization. Then, we discuss one of the main problems in large-scale deployment of SPCoop-like GIFs, namely the need to quickly deploy a large number of middleware instances over a relatively small number of servers. We report a number of experiments to discuss how the different design choices impact performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale test of the framework, from which a number of important lessons can be learned.

Keywords: Government Interoperability Frameworks (GIF), Service Level Agreements (SLA), domain gateways, e-Government, interoperability, middleware

Categories: H.3.5, H.4.2, H.4.3