Toward Integration The More Things Change...

D eveloping any nontrivial middleware-baseddistributed system is hard, regardless of themiddleware technology. Although technolo-gy’s continuous march should make systems easi-er to develop, somehow the details always remain challenging. New technologies only seem to make simple things simpler; they don’t help with the more complex things. Horizontal concerns, such as security, transactions, fault tolerance, load bal-ancing, and enterprise management, never seem to get easier, regardless of what middleware devel-opment platform you choose. The complexity in deploying a production-quality middleware system dwarfs its development difficulty. Along with the application, a lot of mov-ing parts come into play in a production deploy-ment: network and computing hardware, operatin