Middleware, as necessary pervasive software aimed at supporting distributed applications in a heterogeneous environment, played and still plays an important role in the advance of Internet technologies and the development of new applications. Remote execution and event notification, but also mobility management and context awareness, are facilitated by middleware services and protocols. Although the middleware area of computer science has been established for more than 25 years, there aren’t many textbooks about it on the market. In this context, Introduction to middleware: web services, object components, and cloud computing is welcome. The book covers many topics, from enabling technologies to web services and cloud middleware. Unfortunately, mobile computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) are not included; maybe they will be added in a future edition.

There are different approaches to presenting/teaching middleware. For example, one can start with the concepts (service, service description, service-oriented architecture); continue with specific services such as discovery, remote execution, event notification, and context awareness; and conclude with technologies and implementations/specifications like CORBA, Java message service (JMS), and .NET. This book takes a somewhat different path that stresses the importance of technologies. After introducing the concepts in Section 1, Section 2 is dedicated to enabling technologies. Why is Internet protocol (IP) so important? It is unclear unless someone is interested in studying IP and non-IP networks specific to mobile networks (ad hoc), but that topic is not discussed in the book. On the other hand, the domain name system (DNS) is missing. DNS can be interesting not only as a middleware topic, but also regarding name service changes for IoT--named data, DNSA, and so on. At the same time, the length of the technologies section is too long for a reader avid to learn about middleware. Three sections present the object-oriented paradigm for middleware (CORBA, .NET, and enterprise Java beans), web services (RESTful and non-RESTful), and the message-oriented model (JMS). Two shorter sections are dedicated to cloud middleware and how to compare different middleware systems.

The strengths of the book are linked to the thorough presentation of the technologies. I found use cases and performance evaluation to be missing in the present content.

Generally, the book can be adopted and recommended for middleware courses, with each lecturer having the choice to design his or her content.

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