IT Architectures and Middleware: Strategies for Building Large, Integrated Systems, Second Edition

2. The Emergence of Standard Middleware

The aim of this chapter and the next two is to give a short introduction to the range of middleware technologies from a historical point of view and afford an insight into some of the factors that have been driving the industry. This background knowledge is vital for any implementation design that uses middleware, which today is practically all of them.

So far as we know, the first use of the word middleware was around 1970, but it was an isolated case. In the early days there didn’t appear to be a need for middleware. (In the 1970s many organizations didn’t see much point in database systems either.) The awareness came gradually, and we will review how this came about. The following sections look at various ...