Introduction to the Proceedings of the EDOC 2008 Workshop Middleware for Web Services (MWS) 2008

Middleware is software that provides common functionality in a distributed computing system. Use of middleware significantly simplifies development of distributed applications, including those using Web service technologies. For example, middleware can support implementation independence and quality of service (QoS) management. The Middleware for Web Services (MWS) 2008 workshop is the fourth workshop in the series of international workshops on this topic, which are organized annually at the IEEE EDOC conferences. The MWS 2008 program contains 2 invited keynote presentations and 10 peer-reviewed papers (5 full and 5 short). This introduction to the Proceedings of MWS 2008 starts with a brief explanation of the motivation for the workshop and its history. Then, it contains a short description of the keynotes and peer-reviewed papers. After concluding statements, MWS 2008 Program Committee members and external reviewers are listed.