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Middleware-based Distributed Systems Software Process
Authors: Liu JingYong, Zhang LiChen, Zhong Yong and Chen Yong
Number of views: 594
Middleware facilitates the development of distributed systems by accommodating heterogeneity, hiding distribution details and providing a set of common and domain specific services. It plays a central and essential role for developing distributed systems. However, middleware is considered a mean rather than core elements of development process in the existing distributed systems software process. This paper explains the concept of middleware by categorizes middleware and analysis the problems of current middleware architectures. It also extracts three essential non-functional requirements of middleware and proposes a middleware-based distributed systems software process. The proposed software process consists in five phases: requirements analysis, design, validation, development and testing. The characteristics of middleware are considered in the entire software process. Component-Based Software Engineering, Separation of Concerns, Model-Driven Architecture, formal methods and Aspect Oriented Programming are five active research areas that have been around for several years now. In this paper, we present how these five paradigms can be put together in the context of a new software development method and we show how they can complement each other at different stages in the development life-cycle of middleware-mediated applications.