Architecting a Common Bridge Abstraction over Different Middleware Paradigms

Currently, there are a number of communication middleware technologies that are successful solutions to provide an abstraction for distributed computing in different domains. Although most current middlewares offer different interfaces for a number of programming languages, they are usually bound to use one specific communication paradigm. The usage of middleware decreases programming complexity, but it is not cost-free and fully transparent. Every distributed application using a communication middleware has some degree of dependence over the specific middleware it uses mainly related to the interaction paradigm of the communication. Therefore, there is no fully transparent way to use middleware at present. This paper contributes to increase the transparency between applications and middlewares by presenting a common bridge that has been architected in an environment that requires using different middleware technologies interchangeably. This bridge is a software component to abstract the complexity of the middleware solutions requiring minimum porting efforts. Some results are presented to validate the transparency.