MIDDLEWARE

The initial promise of service oriented computing (SOC) was a world of globally cooperating services being loosely coupled to flexibly create dynamic business processes and agile applications that may span organisations and heterogeneous computing platforms but can nevertheless adapt quickly and autonomously to changes of requirements or context. Business process modelling and management, Web2.0-style applications, human computing, contextaware systems, and cloud computing emerged mainly due to the paradigm shift towards SOC. Nevertheless, there is still a strong need to merge technology with an understanding of business processes and organizational structures.

While the need for middleware support for SOC is evident and there have been important past research achievements and industry products, the current approaches and solutions still do not sufficiently address issues such as service discovery, re-use, re-purpose, composition and aggregation support, service management, monitoring, and deployment and maintenance of large-scale, heterogeneous, and possibly dynamic infrastructures and applications. Moreover, quality properties (in particular dependability, security, and performance) need to be addressed not only by interfacing and communication standards, but also in terms of actual mechanisms, protocols, and algorithms. Challenges are the administrative heterogeneity, the loose coupling between coarse-grained operations and long-running interactions, high dynamicity, and the required flexibility during run-time. Recently, massive-scale and mobility were added to the challenges for SOC middleware.