| Middleware |
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In computing, middleware consists of Software Agents acting as an intermediary between different Application Components . It is used most often to support complex, Distributed Applications . The software agents involved may be one or many. The and the applications on each side of the system." Middleware is now used to describe Web Server s, Application Server s, Content Management System s, and similar tools that support the application development and delivery process. Middleware is especially integral to modern information based on XML , SOAP , Web Service s, and Service-oriented Architecture . Middleware is the enabling technology of Enterprise Application Integration . In addition to the existing vendors updating their wares to address the newly expanded vision, vendors such as Mercator, Vitria, and WebMethods were specifically founded to provide Web -oriented middleware tools. Groups such as the Apache Software Foundation and the ObjectWeb Consortium encourage the development of Open Source middleware. The term ''middleware'' is sometimes considered a Buzzword . MESSAGE ORIENTED MIDDLEWARE AS MIDDLEWARE MQ is a middleware product. Middleware is an industry buzzword that describes a piece of software that allows two or more software applications to connect together so that they can exchange data. Middleware is a relatively new addition to the computing landscape. It emerged in the 1980’s as a solution to the problem of how to link new applications to older legacy systems. It also facilitated distributed processing – the connection of multiple applications together to create a larger application, usually over a network. A good example of how middleware emerged as a business requirement is the case of the large high street bank: The bank has been storing all of its customer details on its large mainframe since the 1960’s. This mainframe is still used heavily and has been upgraded several times. Although ground-breaking in its day, its usefulness to the bank’s staff has diminished in recent years as the bank has introduced a new, separate PC based application that allow the bank’s staff to offer customers new services that the mainframe cannot offer. An ideal situation would allow the PC based application to link to the older mainframe application and allow the mainframe’s data to be used within the PC application and vice versa. The advantages of being able to access the mainframe’s data are two-fold. • The old user-unfriendly mainframe terminals can be replaced by the new front end PC application. • The data from the mainframe can be used in new ways on the PC system that were previously impossible due to the constraints of the mainframe’s software. Up until the late 1980’s, there was no easy way to link these different applications together, developers were faced with several challenges: The developers would have to have created a separate software ‘adapter’ on both systems. So that data from the source application was translated into a format that the destination system could understand and vice versa. Both systems would have been constrained by the other’s processing speed. In other words if the mainframe was running slowly the PC based application would have to wait until the mainframe caught up, thereby slowing down the PC application. A network gateway system would have had to be installed to form a bridge between the mainframe’s network and the PC network as the different systems were using different network protocols. The gateway would translate the network packets from the source system and pass them on to the destination system using the destination system’s protocol. As you can see from the above example the road to true integration between the two applications was a long and painful one. It was also one that needed to be trodden every time two applications on disparate platforms needed to be linked together as no two situations were exactly the same. With this much effort in linking together applications on different systems, IT departments were spending nine or ten times the amount than they had in originally developing the applications in the first place. What developers needed was a separate piece of software that would literally sit in the middle of two or more applications and would handle all the ‘plumbing’ between the two systems. The software needed to be able to handle different platforms, programming languages, network protocols and hardware. Developers wanted to remove themselves from the complexities of the underlying infrastructure so that they could focus on functionality within the application itself. Towards the end of the 1980’s middleware began to emerge which attempted to address these issues. Initially the middleware offerings were specific to a handful of platforms or languages so their usefulness was limited. However, as time has gone on, middleware products have become more and more advanced, supporting multiple platforms, languages and protocols. The ability of middleware to link together disparate systems across a heterogeneous network environment is now just one of the benefits of this dominant technology. Middleware these days provides a whole raft of new functionality that augments and enhances the existing applications that its designed to connect together. Examples of Middleware
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