Applying Component Frameworks to Develop Flexible Middleware

It is now well established that middleware must accommodate a wide variety of requirements imposed by applications and underlying environments. Moreover, it must be able to absorb both static and dynamic changes in those requirements. The current generation of middleware clearly fails to address this need [1]. To help address such concerns, we believe that middleware should be built according to a component-based architecture by wiring together independently developed components. It is perhaps ironic that while current middleware intends to support the compositional paradigm for building applications, it itself suffers from an inflexible and monolithic approach to development.