Contemporary computing methods face enormous challenges related to resource utilization. This phenomenon is gaining importance because of the market’s orientation toward services that demand need-based and dynamic user interfaces from service providers and service agents.

The complexity of seamless interfaces among various stakeholders engaged in the service provisioning process is growing. A variety of approaches, including object orientation, grid computing, service-oriented architectures, agile computing, and semantic Web services, support market orientation of services in order to optimize inter-organizational dialogues, orchestration, and choreography. In this era of globalization, organizations are more inclined to adopt information technology (IT)-mediated business intelligence tools, empowering customers and other stakeholders in the supply chain to have lean resources and enhancing customer retention. Multi-agent-based Web interfaces are thus emerging as an environment for these organizations to garner the benefits of convergence among intelligent agent-based systems and service orientation.

This book provides insights into the issues related to the convergence of agent-based and service-oriented computing methods. Various authors have contributed effectively to the discussion of the emerging needs of these methods. The book focuses on their evolution, and provides comprehensive information on various tools for getting the most from the underlying architectures. The editors have carefully crafted the book’s structure, enabling readers to appreciate the emerging demand for both methods and to use them with the support of various tools. The book’s strength lies in its use of simple, example-based algorithms for various important attributes of service-oriented and agent-based computing. The incremental approaches taken by the authors to explain the basics of these two methods effectively engage the reader.

The book could be better organized, however. It could have included chapters on distributed computing using the component object model (COM) and the distributed COM (DCOM) before embarking on the core issues. Additionally, the book could have more comprehensively discussed the emergence of architectures and quality standards for Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, and included a chapter explaining the effect of these adopted methods on database architectures. Though loose coupling of the databases, applications, networks, and user interfaces is the trend, these contemporary methods will influence the quality of data management approaches, which are intended to provide services that need to be trustworthy and have optimum latency and accuracy. Since the book largely compares various tools and architectures used for agent-based and service-oriented computing, it would have been beneficial to include a digital medium (preferably a CD) with templates for the readers to apply ideas and concepts.

This book is an encyclopedia for readers who are interested in conducting research on agent-based and service-oriented computing. Practitioners will find this book useful for understanding the underlying principles of these two contemporary methods, and will thus be able to use them appropriately to design and develop user-centered services.