Attempting to provide a single, all-purpose solution is certain to lead to chafing or lack of necessary support. Presently, an application's choice of middleware is all to often, as noted in the workshop description, a pervasive and irrevocable commitment . In most circumstances, it should be as simple as possible. In particular, while system-wide properties will necessarily impose demands upon middleware, we do not believe that mechanisms for providing such properties are appropriately provided by middleware. It must be reliable.
Failures can have embarrassing, and often painful, consequences.
We believe that a truly mature discipline for compositional software development will minimize the need for attention to middleware. The middleware industry seems to be falling prey to the very kind of monolithic-systems mentality that compositional software is intended to overcome. We believe that middleware should be based on architectures that support plugable replacement of components. The views and positions expressed here have evolved from research that was supported in part by Texas Instruments and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They have also been influenced by our interactions with numerous colleagues.