Book excerpt: Current IT developments like component-based development and Web services have emerged as effective ways of building complex enterprise-scale information systems and providing enterprise application integration. To aid this process, platforms such as .NET and WebSphere have become standards in web-based systems development. However, there are still a lot of issues that need to be addressed before service-oriented software engineering (SOSE) becomes a prominent and widely accepted paradigm for enterprise information systems development and integration. This book provides a comprehensive view of SOSE through a number of different perspectives. Some of those perspectives include: service-based concepts, modeling and documentation, service discovery and composition, service-oriented architecture, model-driven development of service-oriented applications, service security and service-orientation in mobile settings. The book provides readers with an in-depth knowledge of the main challenges and practices in the exciting, new world of service-oriented software engineering. Addressing both technical and organizational aspects of this new field, it offers a balance making it valuable to a variety of readers, including IT architects, developers, managers, and analysts.