What's Middleware Anyway?

I had a "back to basics" attack today and franctically started surfing the web to find a definitive, comprehensive and convincing definition of "middleware". OK, ObjectWeb has its own definition, formulated after Sacha Krakowiak's work. But well, I was looking for something more matter-of-fact.

I ended up reading a proposal that the US Attorney General, Microsoft, and nine US states agreed upon to settle the antitrust trial led against Microsoft in 2001.

Here's the definition of "non Microsoft middleware" provided in the document:

"'Non-Microsoft Middleware' means a non-Microsoft software product running on a Windows Operating System Product that exposes a range of functionality to ISVs through published APIs, and that could, if ported to or made interoperable with, a non-Microsoft Operating System, thereby make it easier for applications that rely in whole or in part on the functionality supplied by that software product to be ported to or run on that non-Microsoft Operating System."

Well, I think I'll try to find out what's middleware another day...

Upcoming Talk at LinuxWorld San Francisco 05

ObjectWeb will hold a booth (# 2056) in the .org pavillion at Linux World, San Fransisco, CA, USA, on August 9-11, 2005! I will also deliver a talk at 1PM on August 9, 2005:

Middleware the open-source way: technical superiority and business opportunities for the digital age

"Middleware is the new frontier for open source and brings opportunities to contain costs, to focus on innovative engineering, to find new sources of revenue and to go to market with unique competitive advantages. With members in about 80 countries and a team of 400 committers, ObjectWeb is a fast-growing, nonprofit organization that focuses on high-quality open source middleware. For example, JOnAS from ObjectWeb was the first open source application server developed in a nonprofit way to achieve J2EE certification. The benefits of open standard compliant, production-grade middleware is made available to everyone as an alternative, or as a complement, to proprietary solutions.

In this presentation, you’ll learn how open source players come together to build an ecosystem where users find high quality software and professional services. Case studies of open-source middleware deployed in production in government, healthcare, financial institutions and more will demonstrate that, however hidden, open source middleware is now a mainstream option that you should consider too."

Swpat Drama as an American Issue

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1838419,00.asp: "As the Apache Software Foundation, Microsoft Corp. and IBM sort out licensing issues around making the WS-Security specification open-source-friendly, the issue becomes something of a precedent for how Web services specifications will evolve in the open-source world."

"The rapid growth of open-source business models and their distinct licensing requirements pose a challenging problem of adaptability for all standards bodies. Apache's conversation with IBM and Microsoft reveals that a lot more creative work needs to be done to harmonize traditional patent policy frameworks with the new business models to protect all parties from legal risk, while allowing for implementation of standards under the open-source development and licensing models."

A complex way to go. An easier way is to rule out software patents!

Swpats Directive Rejected by EP

Just learnt the directive on "computer implemented inventions" (aka software patent directive) has been rejected altogether by the European Parliament (648 votes against, 14 for, 18 abstentions).

Thanks to this decision, the European industry is not immediatly jeopardized by software patents, and open source based innovation can keep thriving in Europe.

Libre Software Meeting

I gave a presentation about ObjectWeb at the Libre Software Meeting. LSM is a community event organized on a volunteer basis. As we did for the last years, someone from ObjectWeb organized and chaired the "middleware" track. I was the one this year.

Guillaune Sauthier, JOnAS committer and member of the JOnAS core team, gave a technical, although high-level, presentation of JOnAS. Coming soon: the replication of stateful EJBs for failover purposes (in the next version of JOnAS); JORAM high availability and load balancing; JSR88 based deployment wizzard (codename Dolphin); EMB support; automated cluster monitoring and autonomous configuration (JOnAS 5?). Target date for JOnAS 5: alpha by end of 2005, first release 1H 2006.

An online questionaire is available for community to provide feedback and express wishes for JOnAS 5.

Stephane Traumat presented a case study/best practices about the development of a complex J2EE application.

Stephane is currently co-authoring a book about JOnAS titled "JOnAS Live" to be published by SourceBeat soon.

Luis Aris presented XWiki, an ObjectWeb project. XWiki is more than an application; it also is a middleware platform that can be used to develop applications... such as a wiki! XWiki is the first wiki to be supported with professional services. Appart from being a geeky gimmick, wikis are a simple yet efficient collaborative tool, eg to incite developers to document their work. XWiki is used by EADS, IRCAD, NEC France, Mandriva, MForma... The XWiki.com hosting facility totalizes about 3500 wikis to date. XWiki allows the development of applications inside the wiki, with Grrovy or Velocity. XWiki benefits from Google's "Summer of Code" ($2 million alloted to a selection of open source projects) for 7 mini projects. XWiki currently is GPL; may become LGPL soon (industrials such as EADS do not like GPL for obvious reasons).

During the cocktail reception, given at the city hall, learnt from F. Couchet (APRIL) that the directive about software patent was about to be rejected by the European Parliament.

Nice walk into the beautiful city of Dijon then dinner with other delegates, from various communities.