Large-Scale Deployment of Middleware-Oriented Government Interoperability Frameworks

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 in terms of their internal architec- tures, which we call “container-bound” and “container-independent”. 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 that show how container-bound solutions guarantee better scalability in single-instance de- ployments, while container-independent solutions represent a better solution in multiple-instance deployments.