Web services and Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) have become thriving areas of academic research, joint university/industry research projects, and novel IT products on the market. SOC is the computing paradigm that uses Web services as building blocks for the engineering of composite, distributed applications out of the reusable application logic encapsulated by Web services. Web services could be considered the best-known and most standardized technology in use today for distributed computing over the Internet. This book is the second installment of a two-book collection covering the state-of-the-art of both theoretical and practical aspects of Web services and SOC research and deployments. Advanced Web Services specifically focuses on advanced topics of Web services and SOC and covers topics including Web services transactions, security and trust, Web service management, real-world case studies, and novel perspectives and future directions. The editors present foundational topics in the first book of the collection, Web Services Foundations (Springer, 2013). Together, both books comprise approximately 1400 pages and are the result of an enormous community effort that involved more than 100 authors, comprising the world’s leading experts in this field.

The majority of the successful SOE operations in Europe took place in countries occupied by the Germans after the outbreak of war in 1939, Hitler’s forces being regarded as foreign invaders. In Czechoslovakia it was different. The country, which had large numbers of ethnic Germans living within its borders, had been occupied since 1938, allowing the Germans to establish a strong hold on the country which limited the opportunities for subversive action by resistance movements. Nevertheless, resist the Czechs did, despite the Germans conducting savage and indiscriminate reprisals. It was against this background that SOE attempted to infiltrate its agents into Czechoslovakia in 1941, their role being to help in co-ordinating and expanding the resistance movement and to establish communications with the Czech authorities in the UK. Successful actions were admittedly few before 1942 when one of the most successful SOE-backed operations resulted in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the highest-ranking Nazi to be killed by any resistance group. The huge wave of reprisals against the civilian population which followed severely hampered SOE activities in the immediate aftermath. Another factor which limited SOE’s ability to infiltrate Czechoslovakia and to supply the resistance was the distance and difficulty experienced by the RAF in flying to the region. During the short nights of summer, no flights could be attempted. This changed in September 1943 when sorties were able to be conducted from Italy, and by 1944 the scale of operations increased both in frequency and scale. More than 300 Czechs were trained by SOE and, in conjunction with local resistance groups, those that managed to infiltrate back into their homeland, kept the occupying forces constantly on the alert, ensuring that Germany’s eastern flank was never entirely secure. This is the first full, official account of SOE in Czechoslovakia, compiled by SOE headquarters staff who had direct access to all the organisation’s records, many of which were destroyed after the war.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2012, held in Berlin, Germany, in November 2012. The 12 revised full papers presented together with 6 work in progress papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 36 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: market mechanisms, pricing and negotiation; resource allocation, scheduling and admission control; work in progress on tools and techniques for cost-efficient service selection; market modeling; trust; cloud computing in education; and work in progress on cloud adoption and business models.

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the First International Conference on Emerging Technologies in Computing, iCEtiC 2018, held in London, UK, in August 2018. The 26 revised full papers were reviewed and selected from more than 59 submissions and are organized in topical sections covering Cloud, IoT and distributed computing, software engineering, communications engineering and vehicular technology, AI, expert systems and big data analytics, Web information systems and applications, security, database system, economics and business engineering, mLearning and eLearning.