Developing service-oriented applications in a GRID systems

The Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP) software framework has evolved over the last 10 years to become a robust, high performance, service oriented architecture for the access and transport of scientific data from a broad variety of disciplines, over the Internet. Starting with version 4.0 of the server release, Hyrax, has at its core, the Back-End Server (BES). The BES offers ease of programming, extensibility and reliability allowing added functionality especially related to highperformance data Grids, that goes beyond its original goal of distributed data access. We present the fundamentals of the BES server as a component based architecture, as well as our experiences using the BES.