As more and more IT shops deploy multitier middleware platforms and frameworks for the delivery of business-critical application services, they are expecting to garner the benefits of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) or composite application development approach: agility, flexibility, productivity, and extensibility. Typically, these benefits are delivered to application developers by the framework vendors, using proprietary or standards-based protocols. This flexibility for users usually results in complex multitier environments, and the responsibility of managing this complexity has been assumed by developers and IT staff.