A Perspective on the Future of Middleware-Based Software Engineering

Middleware is a software layer that stands between the networked operating system and the application and pro-vides well known reusable solutions to frequently encoun-tered problems like heterogeneity, interoperability, security, dependability. Further, with networks becoming increas-ingly pervasive, middleware appears as a major building block for the development of future software systems. Start-ing with the impact of pervasive networking on comput-ing models, manifested by now common grid and ubiqui-tous computing, this paper surveys related challenges for the middleware and related impact on the software de-velopment. Indeed, future applications will need to cope with advanced non-functional properties such as context-awareness and mobility, for which adequate middleware support must be devised together with accompanying soft-ware development notations, methods and tools. This leads us to introduce our view on next generation middleware, considering both technological advances in the network-ing area but also the need for closer integration with software engineering best practices, to ultimately suggest middleware-based software processes. 1