Middleware

As in every professional field we have slangs, like medical field has its own,
chemical industries have plenty and similarly other domains have their own
characteristic names. In the same manner, software industry also has many
idiosyncratic terms that might be difficult to understand at first. One such
term is middleware. The term middleware is not easy to understand at
first. However, as we discussed in one of earlier post, middleware represents
the middle tier. We showed the development as to how the centralize multiuser based systems were replaced by client server architecture. (Bernstein,
1996).
A new tier was introduced in the new development which was supposed to
reside in the middle of these 2 tiers - - the front end tier and the backend
tier. Typical in the 2 tier architecture, front end tier used to have all the
applications. The application which was developed either in Microsoft or java
technologies or other software, used to reside at the clients machine.
Database was kept at the backed tier in the 2 tier architecture. Soon it was
found that the application, especially the enterprise wide applications were
becoming huge and unwieldy. It was not possible to put all this big
applications on every client machine. Also, need was felt to make the
applications transparent and independent of other tier like the database tier
or the client machine. So the middle tier was introduced, which was to lie in
between the client machine or the end user at one end and the database at
the other. (Blair et al., 1999).
So the middle tier was remarkably independent of the client machine and
the software underlying the user machines. The middle tier was also
independent of the database. The middle tier applications are at times called
collectively as middleware. As we discussed some of the independence
offered by the middleware, the application layer is definitely capable of
existing independently on its dedicate machine called application server.
Application server can have even its own independent IP, independent
location and it can actually server multiple front end machines or get data
from multiple backend servers. The nature of independence is such that the
middleware can communicate with heterogeneous front end layer as well as
various different database servers.
Thus, the middleware can serve multiple browsers or thin clients used by
distinct set of end users. Also, it can source it data from multiple sources like
some from oracle server, other from web sources or still other server like SQL
server. Thus, middle tier can be completely independent of the other tiers.
Nowadays we have various open source middleware applications which can
be used or configured differently to satisfy the typical needs of an
organization. For instance, we have examples of open source ERP solution
which can be configured to run independently. An application server can be

dedicated to this open source solution and then further configuration can be
made to add organization level specific information. Even the report formats
and titles can be specified. So there are multiple levels of independence
which can be built into the middle ware. (Foste & Kesselman, 1999)

References:
Bernstein, P. (1996). Middleware, A Model for Distributed System Service",
Communications of the ACM, 39:2. Available from
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220426503_Middleware_A_Model_f
or_Distributed_System_Services [Accessed February 20, 2016]
Blair G.S., Costa F., Coulson G., Duran H., et al. (1999). The Design of a
Resource-Aware Reflective Middleware Architecture, Proceedings of the 2nd
International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection, St.Malo, France, Springer-Verlag, LNCS, Vol. 1616. Available from
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-48443-4_9#page-1
[Accessed February 20, 2016]
Foster, I. and Kesselman, K.(1999). The Grid: Blueprint for a Future
Computing Infrastructure, Morgan Kaufmann. Available from
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=289914 [Accessed February 20, 2016]