From P2P and Grids to Services on the Web: Evolving Distributed Communities

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.