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Published on: 9/15/1999
Last Visited: 8/31/2000
that be OK when you be paying them to do it, but when you start to let customers access that information themselves, it be too complicated, says Karen Boucher, executive vice president of The Standish Group in West Yarmouth, Mass. Enter middleware to tie together all those apps and connect them to a web front end, hiding the complexity from the customer.
From a technical standpoint, middleware offers several benefits, depending on the type you choose :.
Simplicity.In today's corporate computing environments, many applications have to share data.Putting middleware in the middle can mean each application needs only one interface-to the middleware-instead of a separate interface to each application it needs to talk to. (However, if you be connecting just two applications to one another, it might actually be more complicated to introduce middleware than simply coding the two apps to talk to each other.).
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The benefit is that as you write new applications, you do not have to keep rewriting these services, says Boucher.Applications also talk to each other through this kind of middleware, but it goes beyond that. TP monitors would be overkill for simpler, one-to-one application connectivity tasks, she adds.
Object MonitorsExamplesIBM Component Broker VisiBroker Integrated Transaction Server - Inprise Microsoft Transaction Server.
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According to Boucher, Microsoft has now done away with DCOM and moved on to the current name, COM+.COM+ is also part of a greater Microsoft architectural plan called DNA, for distributed network architecture.DNA includes products and services well beyond the scope of middleware.