Component-based runtime environment for cross-platform applications

The modern day Internet has evolved over the past 50 years from a single-purpose research network to a massively connected network of peers hosting a major percentage of world-wide communications. This evolutionary process has created a network that is performing tasks which were never envisaged in its original design. While emerging overlays such as peer-to-peer networking have spawned in an attempt to cope with the restrictive original design, core-level issues hamper further development. As the Internet grows into an increasingly connected and dynamic network these design flaws will continue to cause problems. This research investigates the use of distributed computing and software runtime environments to host the next generation of Internet applications, in much the same way as the current crop of Internet browsers host thin web applications. It defines a runtime environment that allows developers to create distributed, component-based applications in which the system manages issues such as runtime orchestration, component discovery and component-interaction in a cross-platform environment. A software prototype is developed to demonstrate how such a runtime environment can be used to address the concept of using the Internet as a platform for large-scale applications, while resolving known issues with such existing designs as Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-service (SAAS).