Ian J. Taylor - Böcker

Over the past several years, Internet users have changed in their usage p- terns from predominately client/server-based Web server interactions to also involving the use of more decentralized applications, where they contribute more equally in the role of the application as a whole, and further to d- tributed communities based around the Web. Distributed systems take many forms, appear in many areas and range from truly decentralized systems, like Gnutella, Skype and Jxta, centrally indexed brokered systems like Web s- vices and Jini and centrally coordinated systems like SETI@home. From P2P and Grids and Services on the Web Evolving Distributed Communities provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging trends in peer-to-peer (P2P), distributed objects, Web Services, the Web, and Grid computing technologies, which have rede ned the way we think about d- tributed computing and the Internet. The book has four main themes: d- tributed environments, protocols and architectures for applications, protocols and architectures focusing on middleware and nally deployment of these middleware systems, providing real-world examples of their usage.

This collection of articles on ‘Work?ows for e-Science’ is very timely and - portant. Increasingly, to attack the next generation of scienti?c problems, multidisciplinary and distributed teams of scientists need to collaborate to make progress on these new ‘Grand Challenges’. Scientists now need to access and exploit computational resources and databases that are geographically distributed through theuseof high speed networks. ‘Virtual Organizations’ or ‘VOs’ must be established that span multiple administrative domains and/or institutions and which can provide appropriate authentication and author- ation services and access controls to collaborating members. Some of these VOsmayonlyhavea?eetingexistencebutthelifetimeofothersmayrun into many years. The Grid community is attempting to develop both sta- ards and middleware to enable both scientists and industry to build such VOs routinely and robustly. This, of course, has been the goal of research in distributed computing for many years; but now these technologies come with a new twist service orie- ation. By specifying resources in terms of a service description, rather than allowing direct access to the resources, the IT industry believes that such an approach results in the construction of more robust distributed systems. The industry has therefore united around web services as the standard technology toimplementsuchserviceorientedarchitecturesandtoensureinteroperability between di?erent vendor systems.

Over the past several years, Internet users have changed in their usage p- terns from predominately client/server-based Web server interactions to also involving the use of more decentralized applications, where they contribute more equally in the role of the application as a whole, and further to d- tributed communities based around the Web. Distributed systems take many forms, appear in many areas and range from truly decentralized systems, like Gnutella, Skype and Jxta, centrally indexed brokered systems like Web s- vices and Jini and centrally coordinated systems like SETI@home. From P2P and Grids and Services on the Web Evolving Distributed Communities provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging trends in peer-to-peer (P2P), distributed objects, Web Services, the Web, and Grid computing technologies, which have rede ned the way we think about d- tributed computing and the Internet. The book has four main themes: d- tributed environments, protocols and architectures for applications, protocols and architectures focusing on middleware and nally deployment of these middleware systems, providing real-world examples of their usage.