Hugh Pyle provides an excellent description Edge Services:
In the edge services model there is no Big Central Server, just a whole lot of PCs (at the edge of the network: behind firewalls, on roaming WiFi connections, DHCP-assigned IP addresses, all the usual garbage - you generally can't find a simple IP address to call into these machines). By building SOAP interfaces to the services these PCs can implement - and there's a whole lot of interesting services they can provide - you get a new world of interop between Groove and Web. The magic sauce is somewhere in the middle, using well-known relay points (multiple, many) to be able to call these devices's services (and receive callback events from them) regardless where the endpoints are.
This is one of the ways that has made this project so challenging, and interesting. Most Web Services models are an extension of Client/Server architectures. The service lives in the center, and you call it from the edge. At Groove we are all about decentralization which leaves the power with the user. So I can have my information accessible from anywhere, but it is always under my control and on my devices. Of course, I do have to have a device connected somewhere to access it. But hopefully you get the concept.
9:09:42 AM 
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