is organized in three parts. The first part constitutes an overview, a more detailed motivation of the problem context, and a tutorial-like introduction to middleware systems. The second part is comprised of a set of chapters that study solutions to leverage the trade-off between a transparent programming model and application-level enabled resource control. The third part of this book presents three detailed distributed application case studies and demonstrates how standard middleware platforms fail to adequately cope with resource control needs of the application designer in these three cases: -An electronic commerce framework for software leasing over the World Wide Web; -A remote building energy management system that has been experimentally deployed on several building sites; -A wireless computing infrastructure for efficient data transfer to non-stationary mobile clients that have been experimentally validated. weiterlesen