Dark Matter Revisited

During the past 20 years, we've produced myriad toolkits aimed at simplifying distributed programming and integration, including many proprietary or homegrown-based approaches and many others based on well-known approaches such as distributed computing environment (DCE), CORBA, J2EE, and Web services. It's not only distributed computing and integration's inherent difficulties that make these tool-kits complicated. Perhaps ironically, success also makes them more complex. Many distributed integrated applications, including much of the software running the Web are based on "middleware dark matter" which consists of dynamic languages like Python, Perl and PHP. We survey three dynamic language distributed computing systems.