Middleware 2009

This edition marks the tenth Middleware conference. The ?rst conference was held in the Lake District of England in 1998, and its genesis re?ected a growing realization that middleware 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 di?erent applications requireda unique combinationofhi- level abstraction and low-level optimization, and presented challenges di?erent from building a monolithic distributed system. Since that ?rst conference, the notion of what constitutes middleware has changed somewhat, and the focus of research papers has changed with it. The ?rst edition focused heavily on distributed objects as a metaphor for building systems, including six papers with CORBA or ORB in the title. In f- lowing years, the conference broadened to cover publish/subscribe messaging, peer-to-peer systems, distributed databases, Web services, and automated m- agement, 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 pl- forms (such as stream systems, pervasive systems and cloud systems), managing enterprise data centers, and platforms for building other platforms, among o- ers.