Location-based Services Fundamentals and Operation

Chapter 12. LBS Middleware

The term middleware stems from the distributed computing area and refers to a set of standardized APIs, protocols, as well as infrastructure services for supporting the rapid and convenient development of distributed services and applications based on the client/server paradigm. When the first distributed applications became important in the early 1990s, application developers were increasingly faced with a multitude of heterogeneous programming languages, hardware platforms, operating systems, and communication protocols, which complicated both the programming and deployment of distributed applications. The term middleware refers to a layer that is arranged on top of operating systems and communications stacks and thus hides heterogeneity from the applications through a set of common, well-defined interfaces. In this way, the distributed client and server components an application is made up of can be programmed in the same manner as if they were executed on the same host. The application programmer does not have to care for aspects resulting from distribution, but can concentrate on the actual functions of the application.

The basis for nearly all middleware approaches was founded by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which fixed the common principles and structures of middleware in a framework known as Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP). The main objective of ODP is to achieve distribution, interworking, and ...