Middleware

Usage of middleware

Many categories of middleware have been defined, based on the field in which it is used or the application module it serves. A recent bibliography identified the main categories of middleware as follows:

• Transactional: Processing of multiple synchronous/asynchronous transactions, serving as a cluster of associated requests from distributed systems such as bank transactions or credit card payments.
• Message-oriented: Message queue and message passing architectures that support synchronous/asynchronous communication.
• Procedural: Remote and local architectures to connect, pass, and retrieve software responses of asynchronous systems communications such as a call operation.
• Object-oriented: Similar to procedural middleware, but incorporates object-oriented programming design principles. Analytically, its software component encompasses object references, exceptions, and inheritance of properties via distributed object requests.

Other examples

The term middleware is used in other contexts as well. Middleware is sometimes used in a similar sense to a software driver, an abstraction layer that hides detail about hardware devices or other software from an application.

• The Android operating system uses the Linux kernel at its core, and provides an application framework that developers incorporate into their applications. In addition, Android provides a middleware layer including libraries that provide services such as data storage, screen display, multimedia, and web browsing. Because the middleware libraries are compiled to machine language, services execute quickly. Middleware libraries also implement device-specific functions, so applications and the application framework need not concern themselves with variations between Android devices. Android's middleware layer also contains the ART virtual machine and its core Java application libraries.
• Middleware also refers to the software that separates two or more APIs and provides services such as rate-limiting, authentication, and logging.
• Game engine software such as Gamebryo and RenderWare are sometimes described as middleware because they provide services to simplify game development.
• In simulation technology, middleware is generally used in the context of the high level architecture (HLA) that applies to many distributed simulations. It is a layer of software that lies between the application code and the run-time infrastructure. Middleware generally consists of a library of functions, and enables a number of applications—simulations or federates in HLA terminology—to page these functions from the common library rather than recreate them for each application.
• In x86 computers, UEFI/BIOS is a middleware between the operating system and the hardware.
• Wireless networking developers can use middleware to meet the challenges associated with a wireless sensor network (WSN). Implementing a middleware application allows WSN developers to integrate operating systems and hardware with the wide variety of currently available applications.
• The QNX operating system offers middleware for providing multimedia services for use in automobiles, aircraft, and other environments.
• Radio-frequency identification (RFID) software toolkits provide middleware to filter noisy and redundant raw data.