Welcome to Venice

Venice is a lightweight Service Grid for developing, deploying and running services on the Internet. It offers a software infrastructure, a set of well-selected services and a runtime environment. The Venice software infrastructure is based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in combination with an event-driven architecture (EDA) with focus on openness, dependability and security. Venice offers a set of services that addresses service management at runtime, service information and access, service collaboration and communication as well as services for building distributed applications upon.

Additionally, Venice provides a Service Abstraction Layer that uses the Venice services in order to transparently deliver a high-level abstraction to the functionality the Venice services offer (like single sign-on, service information, replication or runtime statistics). This abstraction layer also enables the transparent usage of the Web service and Peer-to-Peer technology lying underneath the Venice services. Finally, Venice offers a runtime environment for the quick and easy service development and deployment which includes a vast support for client development and service access.

Venice offers an Application Programming Interface (API) that hides as much of the technology-related specifics as possible while still being as generic as possible. The only information visible to a programmer are the URIs of the services and the data types used by those services. As part of the abstraction layer, Venice provides a special Venice service compiler that automatically creates the necessary files and code constructs needed during the life-cycle of a Venice service.

The Venice Service Grid is being developed at the Integrated Communication Systems Lab at the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany.