Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Conference on Middleware

Abstract

This edition marks the tenth Middleware conference. The first conference was held in the Lake District of England in 1998, and its genesis reflected a growing realization that systems were a unique breed of distributed system requiring their own rigorous research and evaluation. Distributed systems had been around for decades, and the Middleware conference itself resulted from the combination of three previous conferences. But the attempt to build common platforms for many different applications required a unique combination of high-level abstraction and low level optimization, and presented challenges different from building a monolithic distributed system. Since that first conference, the notion of what constitutes middleware has changed somewhat, and the focus of research papers has changed with it. The first edition focused heavily on distributed objects as a metaphor for building systems, including six papers with CORBA or ORB in the title. In following years, the conference broadened to cover publish/subscribe messaging, peer-to-peer systems, distributed databases, web services, and automated management, among other topics. Innovative techniques and architectures surfaced in workshops, and expanded to become themes of the main conference, while changes in the industry and advances in other research areas helped to shape research agendas. This tenth edition includes papers on next generation platforms (such as stream systems, pervasive systems and cloud systems), managing enterprise datacenters, and platforms for building other platforms, among others. However, a common theme runs through all this diversity: the need to build reliable, scalable, secure platforms to serve as the key ingredient for distributed applications. Again, this year, the program reflects a very strong set of contributions. In the research track, 21 papers have been selected from 110 submissions. The conference's industrial track reflects the ongoing need for researchers and practitioners to work together to realize systems in practice. In addition, the conference includes a diverse workshop program, including a symposium for doctoral students.