What is middleware exactly

Question

I have heard a lot of people talking recently about middleware  but what is the exact definition of middleware  When I look into middleware  I find a lot of information and some definitions  but while reading these information and definitions  it seems that mostly all  wares  are in the middle of something  So  are all things middleware   Or do you have an example of a ware that isn t middleware

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Wikipedia has a quite good explanation  http   en wikipedia org wiki Middleware  It starts with     Middleware is computer software that connects software components or applications  The software consists of a set of services that allows multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact    What is Middleware gives a few examples

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Middleware stands between web applications and web services that natively can t communicate and often are written in different languages frameworks   One such example is OWIN middleware for  NET environment  before owin people were forced to host web apps in a microsoft hosting software called IIS  After owin was developed  it has added capacity to host both in IIS and self host  in IIS was just added support for Owin which acted as an interface  Also it become possible to host  NET web apps on Linux via Mono  which again added support for Owin   It also added capacity to create Single Page Applications  Owin handling Http request response context  so on top of owin you can add authentication authorization logic via OAuth2 for example  you can configure middleware to register a class which contains logic of user authentification  for ex  OAuth2 implementation  or class which contains logic of how to manage http request response messages  that way you can make one application communicate with other applications services via different data format  like json  xml  etc if you are targeting web

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Simply put Middleware is a software component which provides services to integrate disparate systems together    In an complex enterprise environment  there are a number of challenges when you need to integrate two or more enterprise systems together to talk to each other  Normally these systems do not understand each others language as they are developed on different platforms using different languages  like C    Java  Cobol  etc      So here comes middleware software in picture which provides services like   transformation of messages formats from one app to other   routing and enriching messages besides taking care of security   encryption   validation and  applying different business rules to these messages     A typical example of middleware is an ESB products like IBM message broker  WMB IIB   WESB  Datapower XI50  Oracle Fusion  Mule and many others    Therefore  middleware sits mostly in between the service consuming apps and services provider apps and help these apps to talk to each other

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it is a software layer between the operating system  and applications on each side of a distributed computing system in a network  In fact it connects heterogeneous network and software systems

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Lets say your company makes 4 different products  your client has another 3 different products from another 3 different companies   Someday the client thought  why don t we integrate all our systems into one huge system  Ten minutes later their IT department said that will take 2 years   You  the wise developer  said  why don t we just integrate all the different systems and make them work together in a homogeneous environment  The client manager staring at you    You continued  we will use a Middleware  we will study the Inputs Outputs of all different systems  the resources they use and then choose an appropriate Middleware framework    Still explaining to the non tech manager With Middleware framework in the middle  the first system will produce X stuff  the system Y and Z would consume those outputs and so on

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Middleware is a terribly nebulous term  What is  middleware  in one case won t be in another  In general  you can expect something classed as middleware to have the following characteristics    Primarily  usually exclusively  software  usually doesn t need any specialized hardware  If it weren t there  applications that depend on it would have to incorporate it as part of their application and would experience a lot of duplication  Almost certainly connects two applications and passes data between them    You ll notice that this is pretty much the same definition as an operating system  So  for instance  a TCP IP stack or caching could be considered middleware  But your OS could provide the same features  too  Indeed  middleware can be thought of like a special extension to an operating system  specific to a set of applications that depend on it  It just provides a higher-level service   Some examples of middleware    distributed cache message queue transaction monitor packet rewriter automated backup system

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Middleware is about how our application responds to incoming requests  Middlewares look into the incoming request  and make decisions based on this request  We can build entire applications only using middlewares  For e g  ASP NET is a web framework comprising of following chief HTTP middleware components    Exception error handling Static file server Authentication MVC    As shown in the above diagram  there are various middleware components in ASP NET which receive the incoming request  and redirect it to a C  class  in this case a controller class

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Middleware is a general term for software that serves to  glue together  separate  often complex and already existing  programs  Some software components that are frequently connected with middleware include enterprise applications and Web services

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There are  at least  three different definitions I m aware of   in business computing  middleware is messaging and integration software between applications and services in gaming  middleware is pretty well anything that is provided by a third-party in  some  embedded software systems  middleware provides services that applications use  which are composed out of the functions provided by the hardware abstraction layer - it sits between the application layer and the hardware abstraction layer

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If I am not wrong  in software application framework  based on the context  you can consider middleware for the following roles that can be combined in order to perform certain activities in between the user request and the application response    Adapter Sanitizer Validator

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There is a common definition in web application development which is  and I m making this wording up but it seems to fit   A component which is designed to modify an HTTP request and or response but does not  usually  serve the response in its entirety  designed to be chained together to form a pipeline of behavioral changes during request processing   Examples of tasks that are commonly implemented by middleware    Gzip response compression HTTP authentication Request logging   The key point here is that none of these is fully responsible for responding to the client   Instead each changes the behavior in some way as part of the pipeline  leaving the actual response to come from something later in the sequence  pipeline    Usually  the middlewares are run before some sort of  router   which examines the request  often the path  and calls the appropriate code to generate the response   Personally  I hate the term  middleware  for its genericity but it is in common use   Here is an additional explanation specifically applicable to Ruby on Rails

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It is just a piece of software or a tool  on which your application executes and  rapplication capabilities with respect to high availability scalability integrating with other softwares or systems without you bothering about your application level code changes    For example   The operating system on which your application runs requires an I P change   you do not have to worry about it in your code   it is the middleware stack on which you can simple update the configuration   Example 2   You experience problems with your runtime memory allocation and feel that the your application usage has increased   you do not have to much about it unless you have a bug or bottleneck in your code   it is easily achievable by tuning middleware software configuration on which your application runs    Example 3   You have multiple disparate software and you need them to talk to each other or send data in a common format which is understandable by all the systems then this is where middleware systems comes handy   Hope the information provided helps

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From my own experience with webwork  a middleware was stuff between users  the web browser  and the backend database  It was the software that took stuff that users put in  example  orders for iPads  did some magical business logic  i e  check if there are enough iPads available to fill the order  and updated the backend database to reflect those changes

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Some examples of middleware  CORBA  Remote Method Invocation  RMI       The examples mentioned above are all pieces of software allowing you to take care of communication between different processes  either running on the same machine or distributed over e g  the internet

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I always thought of it as the oldest software I have had to install  The total app used a web server  a database server  and an application server  The web server being the middleware between the data and the app

[frameworks] What is middleware exactly?

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Examples related to middleware