To make distributed development successful, we have defined interfaces that allow separated groups to work independently of their counterparts at other locations as much as possible. We have defined a common architecture and infrastructure, so that work done at one location is not unnecessarily duplicated at another, and that similar tasks are done in a similar way throughout the project. A single, integrated Archive attends to the needs of all subsystems for persistent storage, and hides details of the underlying database technology. The separation of functional from technical concerns is built into the system architecture through the use of the Container-Component model: application developers can concentrate on implementing functionality in runtime-deployable components, which in turn depend on Containers to provide them with services such as access to remote resources, transparent serialization of value objects to XML, logging, error-handling and security. The resulting middleware, which forms part of the ALMA Common Software (ACS), is based on CORBA and XML.