Middleware: Past and Present a Comparison

The construction of distributed systems is a difficult task for programmers, which can be simplified with the use of middleware. Middleware can be seen as a layer between applications and operating systems. There are four main types of middleware: transactional, message-oriented, procedural and object-oriented middleware. The first three types of middleware can be seen as a past and the last one as a present middleware. The variety of middleware types leads to a choice problem for the software developers. In order to solve it, we research the classification of the middleware, pro and contra of each middleware type. This review is based on analyzing of middleware through the following requirements, proposed by [9]: network communication, coordination, reliability, scalability and heterogeneity. During this paper we try to find out, how good the middleware types support these requirements.