Towards a holistic approach for integrating middleware with software product lines research

Prior research on software product lines (SPLs) in different do-mains (e.g., avionics mission computing, automotive, cellular phones) has focused primarily on managing the commonalities and variabil-ities among product variants at the level of application functional-ity. Despite the fact that the application-level SPL requirements drive the specializations (i.e., customizations and optimizations) to the middleware that host the SPL variants, middleware specializa-tion is seldom the focus of SPL research. This results in substan-tial and ad hoc engineering efforts to specialize middleware in ac-cordance with the functional and quality of service (QoS) require-ments (e.g., latency, reliability) of the product lines. To overcome these problems, this paper highlights the need to unify middleware specialization issues within SPL research, and argues for new re-search directions in modularization and generative programming techniques that can account for the deployment and runtime issues, such as QoS and resource management. Preliminary ideas demon-strating how feature-oriented programming and model-driven de-velopment tools together can address these challenges are presented