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Reviewer: Ghassan Beydoun

The information technology (IT) industry has given the thumbs-up to service-oriented architecture (SOA). Big players, such as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, are investing heavily in SOA development tools. What is still missing is a thorough methodology for, and a software engineering approach to, SOA. It remains to be seen whether or not industry support is premature. This book is very timely, and an important step in providing a methodological approach to developing reliable service-based systems. The book covers the analysis, verification, and validation of SOA. The book is a cohesive collection of papers, seamlessly integrated with a very familiar example of using services: John and his wife are organizing and going on a weekend getaway. All contributors of the book use this very accessible and familiar example to illustrate their views on, and solutions to, issues concerning the development of reliable SOA. The early parts of the book are tuned to the early phase of analysis in the software development life cycle (SDLC). The first two chapters focus on the motivation of SOA, underpinning key functional requirements and specifications. Chapters 3 through 5 discuss analysis and model-driven composition. The rest of the book, starting with chapter 6, does not focus on the classical phases of the SDLC; the authors, and editors, intend a focus on validation and verification. These chapters focus on reliability, security, and other related issues. While the book makes a valuable contribution to the software engineering of SOA-based systems, it does not pretend to cover the whole SDLC. The design and implementation of services are not covered, and full SDLC coverage remains unfulfilled. It would have been a refreshing step if the last part of the book addressed the issues of security and reliability from a pure software engineering perspective, aligning it with the modern view that puts security and reliability in the fold of analysis and design. Not to take away from the valuable software engineering contributions of the book, a concluding chapter, critically highlighting the gaps and the areas not covered in the book, would have been valuable, and would have added further cohesion to the text. Online Computing Reviews Service