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Middleware dark matter
Steve Vinoski, middleware architect at IONA and a prolific columnist, has been blogging for a couple of months at Middleware Matters. Back in 2002, his IEEE Internet Computing column used the title that I stole for this blog entry: Middleware Dark Matter. The reference is to Clay Shirky's excellent meme "PCs are the dark matter of the Internet," which helped the peer-to-peer movement define itself circa 2000. Vinoski wrote:
We can apply a similar analogy to middleware because the mass of the middleware universe is much greater than the systems -- such as message-oriented middleware (MOM), enterprise application integration (EAI), and application servers based on Corba or J2EE -- that we usually think of when we speak of middleware. We tend to forget or ignore the vast numbers of systems based on other approaches. We can't see them, and we don't talk about them, but they're out there solving real-world integration problems -- and profoundly influencing the middleware space. These systems are the dark matter of the middleware universe. [Steve Vinoski]
Absolutely true. When I read this, though, I couldn't help but imagine the same column having been written, for another audience, like so:
The mass of the middleware universe is much greater than the systems -- based on Perl, Python, CGI, FTP file transfer, Unix shell, Visual Basic -- that we usually think of when we speak of middleware. We tend to forget or ignore the vast numbers of systems based on other approaches such as message-oriented middleware (MOM), enterprise application integration (EAI), and application servers based on Corba or J2EE. We can't see them, and we don't talk about them, but they're out there solving real-world integration problems -- and profoundly influencing the middleware space. These systems are the dark matter of the middleware universe.
Both of these passages make perfect sense to me. Though driven apart by a deep cultural schism, the two integration styles are utterly co-dependent.
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