Guest editorial: Special issue on the future of middleware
Valérie Issarny, Gordon S. Blair · Journal of Internet Services and Applications · 2012
We are witnessing a period of rapid and intense change in distributed systems, at a rate that is unprecedented since the inception of the subject in the early 1980s. With the advent of cloud computing, for example, we can see the deployment of very large-scale distributed systems offering a range of novel and exciting new services, including interesting new paradigms for large-scale computation. Distributed systems are also becoming significantly more heterogeneous spanning very small devices embedded in the physical environment around us through data centres housing massive cluster computers. In addition, users of distributed systems are often on the move resulting in significant context changes over time, which the system must adapt to. Networking technologies also continue to evolve with, for example, the emergence of a range of new ad hoc networking techniques and peer-to-peer approaches to implementing core network services.