Web Services in the Enterprise: Concepts, Standards, Solutions, and Management. Akhil Sahai and Sven Graupner. New York: Springer, 2005. 312 pp

For those who have an academic background of distributed systems and management, upon acquainting oneself with Web services two questions are usually raised:

(1) What is the difference between Web services and middleware like CORBA? (2) What makes Web services and their management so unique, e.g., what makes it different from commonWeb applications such as Web server applications? The answers to these questions can be found in the book written by Akhil Sahai and Sven Graupner. This book not only covers concepts and architectures related to Web services and their management, but also provides details on the relationship between Web services and middleware as well as the relationship among web services management, network management, application management, enterprise management and business management. The book is divided into three major parts. The first part (Chapters 1 to 4) introducesWeb services concepts and standards, such as service description, service registry and discovery as well as service composition. Also in this part, traditional application management, which is regarded as a basis for Web service management, is discussed in terms of main life cycle of applications, namely application creation, application deployment and application operation. As current IT infrastructures in enterprises are becoming more and more service oriented, enterprise management has a close relationship with Web service management. Thus Chapter 4 is focused on issues that include agent-based management infrastructure, three-tiered management infrastructure, FCAPS (Fault Configuration Account Performance Security) functionality model, integrated IT service management (ITSM) and model-based management.