Proceedings of the 4th workshop on Reflective and adaptive middleware systems
Venue: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 116 (2005)

It is a great pleasure to introduce the ACM/IEEE/IFIP Middleware Workshop Program for Grenoble 2005. This is the fourth time that Middleware has included a Workshop Program, and the levels of interest and the standard of submissions continue to be extremely high. This year we have five workshops. The Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM05) is our most venerable institution, and is now in its fourth incarnation, having started out at Middleware 2000 in New York and run at every Middleware since. Two of the other workshops are also well established, having run previously in Rio and Toronto. These are the Workshop on Middleware for Grid Computing (MGC05), and the Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-hoc Computing (MPAC05). MPAC this year is joined by Didier Donsez and his team whose proposal for a workshop on 'Middleware for Sensor-Based Services' has been merged into MPAC. As a consequence, this event is running over two days rather than the usual one day. Another workshop that is continuing a lively tradition is the Doctoral Symposium on Middleware. This popular event has worked particularly well in the past and represents a wonderful opportunity for young reseachers in our field to present their work to a mock thesis committee of mentors and to receive valuable and supportive feeback. This year we also have a new workshop: the 1st Workshop on Aspect Oriented Middleware Development (AOMD05). This highlights what seems to be a promising area of synergistic research that has recently been receiving a lot of attention. We look forward to a productive dialogue on the relationship between aspectisation techniques and middleware techniques. Middleware provides a robust and flexible abstraction for connecting applications together. As connectivity is the major aspect addressed in middleware, historically middleware is implemented as monolithic software targeted to specific environments and application domains. As a result, older middleware implementations can only perform satisfactorily in their target enviroments and often can not be used in other types of applications. This inflexibility can usually be attributed to middleware implementations' inability to adapt the behaviors or structure of the platforms to the requirements of changing environments and application domains. In recent years, researchers have been experimenting with and applying adaptive and reflective techniques such as reflection, component-based software engineering, software architecture design patterns and component frameworks, to extend the application domains for middleware. The trend can easily be observed in middleware tailored for large-scale enterprise applications where diverse infrastructure and applications are becoming common-place. Similarly, middleware is being applied to new areas such as mobile computing, distributed multimedia, and distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems, where resources are either constrained or have changing availability over time. Applying adaptive and reflective techniques to middleware has shown to provide a greater degree of configurability and dynamic adaptability for applications. This is the 4th of a series of workshops on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM). Past workshops contributed to the advancement of middleware research by providing researchers venues for exchanging leading-edge views and presenting state-of-the-art studies in the area. Building on the success of past workshops, this workshop aims to further the application of adaptive and reflective middleware techniques to a variety of new application domains, and to support different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in middleware. Because of the positive feedback we got from last year's workshop, we are expanding the panel discussion session. However, this decision has made paper selection an even harder process because we were forced to omit many good papers with exciting ideas from presentation in the workshop program. Fortunately, many authors of these nice papers gracefully accepted our invitations to present their work as posters so that we will not miss out on their good work. For that, the organizing committee would like to express our sincere gratitude. Papers selected for the workshop program represent the main thrusts in Adaptive and Reflective Middleware research. They cover the popular research areas such as aspect and resource management techniques in ARM using composition and reconfiguration. These techniques are being applied at various levels in middleware implementations, from infrastructure design to supporting specific aspects in the class of applications.