DOA 2007 PC Co-chairs’ Message

Welcome to the Ninth International Symposium on Distributed Objects, Middleware and Applications (DOA 2007), held in Vilamoura, Portugal, November 25-30, 2007.

The DOA conferences provide a forum for exchanging the latest research results on distributed objects, components, services, middleware and applications. To emphasize the increasing importance and proliferation of higher-level software abstractions and the associated general-purpose middleware, the term ‘middleware’ was added to the title of DOA this year. Research in objects, middleware and their application establishes new principles that open the way to solutions that can meet the requirements of tomorrow’s applications. Conversely, practical experience in real-world projects drives this same research by exposing new ideas and posing new types of problems to be solved.With DOA 2007 we explicitly intended to provide a forum to help this mutual interaction occur, and to trigger and foster it. Submissions were therefore welcomed along both these dimensions: research (fundamentals, concepts, principles, evaluations, patterns, and algorithms) and practice (applications, experience, case studies, and lessons). Contributions attempting to cross over the gap between these two dimensions were particularly encouraged. Toward this goal, we accepted both research and experience papers.