Software Engineering And Middleware

Middleware provides an integration framework for multiple and potentially - verse computing platforms. It allows developers to engineer distributed appli- tions more easily, providing abstractions and primitives to handle distribution and coordination. Middlewareisconstantlyfacingnewchallenges.Today’sadvancesincomp- ing, including development of pervasive applications, exacerbates the diversity problem, introducing variations not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of environments and device characteristics. Software engineers are the- fore challenged both in the area of the development of new and scalable m- dleware systems, where open, heterogeneous, component-based platforms should provide richer functionality and services, and in the area of application devel- ment, where tools to simplify the use of middleware solutions are necessary. Software Engineering and Middleware is the premier workshop for the - search and practice community of software engineering working in both areas to presentanddiscussnewideasinthis?eld.SEM2004wasthefourthinternational workshop on software engineering and middleware of the EDO/SEM workshop series. Previous workshops of this series were successfully held in 2002, 2000 and 1999. Most of the proceedings have been published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

The 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering and Middleware {SEM 2002) was held May 20-21, 2002, in Orlando, Florida, as a co-located event of the 2002 International Conference on Software Engineering. The workshop attracted 30 participants from academic and industrial institutions in many countries. Twenty-seven papers were submitted, of which 15 were accepted to create a broad program covering the topics of architectures, specification, components and adaptations, technologies, and services. The focus of the workshop was on short presentations, with substantial dis cussions afterwards. Thus, we decided to include in this proceedings also a short summary of every technical session, which was written by some of the partici pants at the workshop. The workshop invited one keynote speaker, Bobby Jadhav of CalKey, who presented a talk on the design and use of model-driven architecture and middle ware in industry. We would like to thank all the people who helped organize and run the workshop. In particular, we would like to thank the program committee for their careful reviews of the submitted papers, Wolfgang Emmerich for being an excellent General Chair, and the participants for a lively and interesting workshop.

Middleware is a critical foundation needed to leverage the development of a wide range of mobile and ubiquitous applications. Intrinsic challenges when building such middleware require the combination of expertise from areas like distributed systems, networking, software engineering, and application development. This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the main fundamental problems, technologies, paradigms, and solutions of concern to developers of middleware for mobile environments. The contributions are grouped into four parts, on networking and programming issues, communication models, middleware issues, and application issues. Each chapter is structured as a self-contained tutorial, presenting an overview of a specific topic and the state-of-the-art solutions for the related problems. In addition, the book also includes an authoritative reference list. The material has been successfully used in several thematic training schools organized by the ESF MiNEMA (Middleware for Network Eccentric and Mobile Applications) program, and the book's organization and presentation is ideal for an advanced course on middleware.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Software Engineering and Middleware, SEM 2002, held in Orlando, FL, USA in May 2002 in collocation with ICSE 2002. The 15 revised full papers presented together with an invited contribution and a concluding summary were carefully selected from 27 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on architectures, specification, components and adaption, technologies, and services.