Middleware 2009

As scientific research increasingly requires the efforts of globally diverse, multidisciplinary teams from different laboratories and organizations, there surfaces a need to facilitate this kind of collaborative work. These large-scale scientific initiatives, where information technology plays an important role, are termed e-Science; e-Science activities employ geographically distributed resources like high performance computing facilities, scientific instruments, databases, and high performance networks.

This practical book provides everything you need to know about the Extensible Messaging and Presence Proto(XMPP). This open technology for real-time communication is used in many diverse applications such as instant messaging, of Voice over IP, real-time collaboration, social networking, microblogging, lightweight middleware, cloud computing, and more.

A major challenge in grid computing remains the application software development for this new kind of infrastructure. Grid application programmers have to take into account several complicated aspects: distribution of data and computations, parallel computations on different sites and processors, heterogeneity of the involved computers, load balancing, etc. Grid programmers thus demand novel programming methodologies that abstract over such technical details while preserving the beneficial features of modern grid middleware.