Introduction to the proceedings of the EDOC 2009 workshop Middleware for Web Services (MWS) 2009

The fifth Middleware for Web Services (MWS) workshop in 2009 is being held at the EDOC 2009 conference in Auckland, New Zealand. The workshop aims to bring together practitioners and academic researchers interested in the advancement of Web services and middleware technologies. This year, the five selected papers represent the new role and challenges middleware and Web services are faced with in light of a rapidly evolving environment which now includes cloud computing, virtualisation and mobile sensors.