Have you ever felt the ease of developing any application or idea that strikes your mind? Thanks to the evolution of middleware, that has helped us develop diverse software programs without perturbing ourselves about the core operating system or hardware.
Middleware is reusable infrastructure software residing between applications and the underlying operating systems, networks and hardware.
Benefits of Middleware
Middleware has primarily given us portability. It effectively manages memory allocation and relocation, data, processes, states, and replication. An assortment of applications can run at the same time. Parallel programming has become smooth to the tip of our fingers. It leverages hardware and software technological advances. It controls end-to-end resources and quality of service.
Numerous libraries cater to the basic or complex needs of our software. We are at ease; we can make the same piece of code work on any platform; we can program fast and there is less work. In the recent times, many applications have been developed with the help of readymade solutions and libraries offered by this layer. So development is quick, hence implementation time in the software life cycle has fairly reduced. Evolution of new requirements in software and environment is guaranteed with middleware.
There is a market for software developers who are hired for developing applications on middleware, Java developers, and Android developers. Also, the availability of such developers is vast, therefore hiring and putting them straight to work with some amount of basic training works well in many software companies.
Limitations of Middleware
For critical applications, performance is a major deciding factor for the application to ardour in this competitive world of abundant applications. In general, for many, performance might not be acute; hence it is generally a trade-off. Because of this middleware shield, we hardly get to design our software for performance. Most actions and decisions of memory management and resource usage are upheld with middleware, so penetrating to those levels of tailoring software is not possible.
With the genesis of middleware, large applications have evolved, sustaining of these remains a concern for software developers. We have a wide variety of programs to perform various tasks. It is required to put consistent time to support such software in long run.
Last but most important, there are competitive advantages of providing custom proprietary solutions. It makes it stand-out and precisely caters to real needs of customers. There is a certain demand for such software that needs to address tailored needs of clients. Getting employees to work such tasks is fairly difficult because it requires assured expertise.
Summarizing the above, it is the collective decision of architects and developers to elect what is the requirement of their software and what can be traded-off to best suit their needs.