Acknowledgments

This book is the result of the contributions of numerous people. We would especially like to acknowledge and pay tribute to our many colleagues in IBM, too numerous to mention individually, who work alongside us in this fascinating area on a daily basis and whose innovation and stimulus have been a significant factor in making Web services a reality. Within that group of people, we would particularly like to thank Bob Sutor, Karla Norsworthy, Diane Jordan, Dan House, and Greg Clarke, who worked tirelessly in helping to bring this work to the world at large in the form of specifications and standards.

We would like to thank Eric Newcomer of IONA Technologies, Daniel Edgar of Portland General Electric, Ronald Schmelzer of ZapThink LLC, and Max Loukianov of Netprise Corp, for their insightful reviews and comments of earlier drafts of this book. Also thanks to Mark Little of Arjuna Technologies, with whom we had extensive helpful dialogue on wide-ranging Web servicesrelated topics. Their input and comments brought about significant improvements and additions to the published version. We're also grateful to the many people in the IT industryin particular our customers who've listened to what we had to say about this subject over the years and provided feedback that has helped to fashion our views about SOA and Web services. This book is also the result of collaboration with colleagues at Microsoft. We would like to acknowledge their contributions to the specifications that helped realize the vision outlined in this book.

We would also like to thank everyone on the publishing team for their excellent guidance on the focus of the book, for their help in realizing this project, and particularly for their patience in an endeavor that was more difficult than we had anticipated.