In this paper, we present a lightweight system that loosely couples and integrates any kind of source systems with information retrieval capabilities. The system provides mechanisms for a rapid integration of source systems into the World Wide Web (WWW), allowing the generation of configurable collections of individual, heterogeneous source systems.

The proposed system is based on a lightweight, messageoriented application server and an object-oriented client framework to provide an uniform, Java-based graphical user interface. The system offers application middleware functionalities that solve issues such as limited bandwidth and scalability of both sides (WWW user clients and backend server systems) in a generic manner. Already integrated source systems include the system PRo-GPd~ SS (a method base system for mathematical algorithms with functionalities for server-side computing) and SPECTO (an XML-based, distributed monitoring system).