An interesting article titled "The Impact of Research on Development of Middleware Technology" which is really out of left field. It was published in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. Probably, many of us don't know much about Middleware technology, but that's not the main reason I wanted to talk about this article here. This paper explains Middleware as follows "Middleware is commonly defined as a software layer between applications and operating systems that provides programmers with higher level of abstractions, such as remote procedure invocation, reliable message exchange and transactions". This paper aims to address the question whether research had any involvement in the creation of Middleware technology that is being sold in the market. With a scientific methodology, the authors show that research in different Computer Science disciplines had an important influence on the development of Middleware standards and products implementing these standards. I just wonder if we would come up with similar results, if we follow their methodology and investigate whether accessibility research had any influence in the development of assistive technologies.

The impact of research on the development of middleware technology

The middleware market represents a sizable segment of the overall Information and Communication Technology market. In 2005, the annual middleware license revenue was reported by Gartner to be in the region of $8.5 billion. In this article we address the question whether research had any involvement in the creation of the technology that is being sold in this market? We attempt a scholarly discourse. We present the research method that we have applied to answer this question. We then present a brief introduction into the key middleware concepts that provide the foundation for this market. It would not be feasible to investigate any possible impact that research might have had. Instead we select a few very successful technologies that are representative for the middleware market as a whole and show the existence of impact of research results in the creation of these technologies. We investigate the origins of Web services middleware, distributed transaction processing middleware, message-oriented middleware, distributed object middleware and remote procedure call systems. For each of these technologies we are able to show ample influence of research and conclude that without the research conducted by PhD students and researchers in university computer science labs at Brown, CMU, Cambridge, Newcastle, MIT, Vrije, and University of Washington as well as research in industrial labs at APM, AT&T Bell Labs, DEC Systems Research, HP Labs, IBM Research, and Xerox PARC we would not have middleware technology in its current form. We summarise the article by distilling lessons that can be learnt from this evidenced impact for future technology transfer undertakings.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/13487689.13487692 Full Proceedings: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 17, Issue 4 (August 2008)

Labels: methodology, Middleware, research