This course focuses on the architectonic solutions for the design of distributed systems. More specifically, the course is oriented to sscenarios based on services (service-oriented architectures) and the deploymen SOA solutions by means of Web Services Technologies (WS-*). Taking the WS-* stack as our techonologcal layout, the course lokks through the description, discovery and invocation of services in an SOA. Finally, The course introduces models for services composition in SOA (again using Web Services as deployment technology).