In the November issue of Computer

Service orientation is not a technology but an extremely wide-ranging philosophy or paradigm. It spans technical scenarios like back-end services, telecommunications, high-level business processes, and day-to-day Web services for everybody. Service orientation’s wide spectrum of maturity mirrors this range. The technological realization of this vision is still in its infancy and is dominated by effect-focused illustrative examples. The goal of this issue is to contribute to the convergence of the currently scattered service-oriented communities and foster the development of a common domain structure now stably adopted in mature technologies such as hardware design and telecommunications