Middleware Matters

My latest "Toward Integration" column in Internet Computing is now available. This one's entitled "Is Your Middleware Dead?" It analyzes our industry's penchant for declaring everything but the latest technologies as being "dead" despite the fact that many such "dead" technologies continue to be used to drive critical systems well after their obituaries appear to have been have been written. This one's a little outside the pure technology realm, as it examines the issue from a customer perspective and a technology market perspective. The link above is to the PDF version, or read it via the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.