Aiming to produce a more powerful and flexible web, we have developed the concept of intermediaries . Intermediaries are computational entities that can be positioned anywhere along an information stream and are programmed to tailor, customize, personalize, or otherwise enhance data as they flow along the stream.
Intermediaries create smart pipes.
A caching web proxy is a simple example of an HTTP intermediary. WBI is a programmable web proxy and web server. We are now making available the WBI Development Kit for building web intermediary applications within the WBI framework, using Java APIs. One key intermediary application is the transformation of information from one form to another, a process called transcoding . In fact, the WBI Development Kit now provides the same plugin APIs as IBM WebSphere Transcoding Publisher .