The European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS) is the premier conference for both researchers and practitioners to exchange the latest advances in the state of the art and practices of Web Services. The main objectives of this conference are to facilitate the exchange between researchers and practitioners and to foster future collaborations in Europe and beyond.

The success encountered by the Web has shown that tightly coupled software systems are only good for niche markets, whereas loosely coupled software systems can be more flexible, more adaptive and often more appropriate in practice. Loose coupling makes it easier for a given system to interact with other systems, possibly legacy systems that share very little with it.

Web services are at the crossing of distributed computing and loosely coupled systems. When applications adopt service-oriented architectures, they can evolve during their lifespan more easily and better adapt to changing or unpredictable environments. When properly implemented, services can be discovered and invoked dynamically using non-proprietary mechanisms, while each service can still be implemented in a black-box manner. This is important from a business perspective since each service can be implemented using any technology, independently of the others. What matters is that everybody agrees on the integration technology, and there is a consensus about this in today’s middleware market: customers want to use Web technologies. Despite these promises, however, service integrators, developers, and providers need to create methods tools and techniques to support cost-effective development and the use of dependable services and service-oriented applications.

This year's keynote speakers are:

• Paul W.P.J.Grefen, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands:
  "Service-Oriented Business Integration: Will we be Dynamic?".


• K. Scott Morrison, Layer 7 Technologies, USA:
  "How to Fail with Web Services".

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