The advent of Internet technology introduces a revolution to software application and development paradigms. Traditional software development and application patterns have been shifted to Internet-based service sharing and collaboration among partners across the Internet. This new paradigm imposes new challenges and complexity in the lifecycle of software development, deployment, execution and maintenance. Middleware, an intermediate layer to abstract the homogeneity and hide the di?erence of underlying systems, can be used to reduce the complexity of managing the lifecycle of Internet applications. In this paper, we exploit the needs of middleware support for Internet-based applications from a service perspective. We investigate the potential requirements and features of Internetware, and analyze the state-of-the-art solutions. We also discuss the remaining issues and their challenges, and explore the potential future research directions.