The Impact of Research on Middleware Technology

Various commercial trends have led to an increasing demand for distributed systems. Distributed systems can integrate legacy components, thus preserving investment, they can decrease the time to market, they can be scalable and tolerant against failures. The caveat, however, is that the construction of a truly distributed systems is considerably more difficult than building a centralized or client/server system. This is because there are multiple points of failure in a distributed system, system components need to communicate with each other through a network, which complicates communication and opens the door for security attacks. Middleware has been devised in order to conceal these difficulties from application engineers as much as possible; Middleware is commonly defined as a software layer between applications and operating systems that provides application programmers with higher level of abstractions, such as remote procedure invocation, reliable message exchange or transactions. These abstractions considerably simplify distributed system construction and as a result middleware products are rapidly being adopted in industry and middleware is generally perceived as a success technology.