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The article explores how and why asynchronous middleware is playing a significant role in distributed and Web-based systems. The objective of synchronous middleware is to provide many of transactions' all-or-none guarantees for certain classes of applications without some of the overhead. Providing alternatives for the powerful combination of atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability that transactional systems provide are the challenge for middleware based on asynchronous principles. The two main categories of middleware use asynchronous messaging systems namely message queues and publish-subscribe.

The restructuring of the electric power grid has created new control and monitoring requirements for which classical technologies may be inadequate. The most obvious way of building such systems, using TCP connections to link monitoring systems with data sources, gives poor scalability and exhibits instability precisely when information is most urgently required. Astrolabe, Bimodal Multicast, and Gravitational Gossip, technologies of our own design, seek to overcome these problems using what are called "epidemic" communication protocols. This paper evaluates a hypothetical power monitoring scenario involving the New York State grid, and concludes that the technology is well matched to the need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the real-time enterprise from a technology point of view, with a strong focus on the challenges of building globally scalable technology. We analyze the different aspects of the real-time enterprise and the link between the real-time functionality and event driven systems. We then review the major bottlenecks in achieving scalability and robustness for event-driven systems when they need to support global enterprise systems. At a conceptual level the real-time enterprise is extremely promising but neither research nor product groups have the technologies to operate at a global scale in a manner that will allow the real-time enterprise to become a reality, unless a number of significant hurdles are removed. This paper examines the impact of the concept of the real-time enterprise on research agenda of academia as well as product groups, and lays out an agenda for achieving scalability and reliability goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses beliefs an misconceptions about Web services. Background on fundamental errors concerning Web services; Components of Web services; Details of the common misconceptions about Web services.