Government interoperability frameworks: Middleware tools for the Italian SPCoop

We discuss deployment solutions for e-Government Interoperability Frameworks (GIFs). We concentrate on the italian SPCoop, a prominent example of a middleware-oriented architectures, where middleware modules act as intermediaries among information systems. We review the SPCoop architecture, and two popular open-source implementations, called OpenSPCoop and freESBee. The two solutions follow radically different philosophies in terms of their internal architectures, which we call "container-bound" and "container-independent". We compare the two systems with respect to one of the main problems in largescale deployment of SPCooop-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.