The challenges of designing, building, and maintaining large-scale, distributed enterprise systems are truly daunting. Written for all IT professionals, The Complete Book of Middleware will aid in resolving new business objectives, new technologies, and vendor disputes. This book focuses on the essential principles and priorities of system design and emphasizes the new requirements brought forward by the rise of e-commerce and distributed integrated systems. This reference highlights the changes to middleware technologies and standards. It offers a concise overview of middleware technology alternatives and distributed systems. Many increasingly complex examples are incorporated throughout and the book concludes with guidelines on the practice of IT architecture. Performance considerations such as caching and monitoring are reviewed and the appendix includes middleware resources and new modeling standards. The scope includes traditional middleware and also next-generation techniques that serve to glue disparate systems in the ever-expanding world of distributed network systems. Provided with concepts, principles, and alternatives discussed in The Complete Book of Middleware, systems architects, systems analysts, systems designers, systems developers, and programmers, can proceed with greater confidence in designing complex enterprise systems.