Guest Editor's Introduction: Special Section on Services and Software Engineering Towards Internetware

The six papers in this special section focuses on services and software computing. Services computing provides a foundation to build software systems and applications over the Internet as well as emerging hybrid networked platforms motivated by it. Due to the open, dynamic, and evolving nature of the Internet, new features were born with these Internet-scale and service-based software systems. Such systems should be situation- aware, adaptable, and able to evolve to effectively deal with rapid changes of user requirements and runtime contexts. These emerging software systems enable and require novel methods in conducting software requirement, design, deployment, operation, and maintenance beyond existing services computing technologies. New programming and lifecycle paradigms accommodating such Internet- scale and service-based software systems, referred to as Internetware, are inevitable. The goal of this special section is to present the innovative solutions and challenging technical issues, so as to explore various potential pathways towards Internet-scale and service-based software systems.