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What is Middleware and How Does it Work?
What is Middleware and How Does it Work?
Today, most business processes have become digitalized, and most organizations have very diverse digital needs.
To fulfill these needs, businesses have to use many different hardware and software products.
Most of these hardware and software were designed separately. They were not necessarily built to work together.
At the same time, organizations need these different hardware and software to work together in order to make digital processes more efficient.
Problem is, how do you make them work harmoniously when they weren’t built to work together?
This is where middleware comes in.
Today, most business processes have become digitalized, and most organizations have very diverse digital needs.
To fulfill these needs, businesses have to use many different hardware and software products.
Most of these hardware and software were designed separately. They were not necessarily built to work together.
At the same time, organizations need these different hardware and software to work together in order to make digital processes more efficient.
Problem is, how do you make them work harmoniously when they weren’t built to work together?
This is where middleware comes in.
WHAT IS MIDDLEWARE?
WHAT IS MIDDLEWARE?
There are usually two levels on any device.
The first one is the operating system, which is the low level software whose main role is to manage the device’s resources and control the device’s basic functions.
The second level is the applications that are meant to run on top of the operating system.
These applications expand the functions of the device beyond what is offered by the operating system.
Middleware refers to any behind the scenes software that allows these two levels to communicate and interact with each other.
For instance, middleware will sit between Windows 10 and an office productivity suite.
Aside from the operating system and applications, middleware also helps separate process, applications and software components to exchange information either within the same device, or between multiple devices.
You can compare middleware to a translator helping people who speak different languages understand each other.
In this case, middleware facilitates interoperability between applications running on different frameworks. Middleware does this by providing a standard-based means of data exchange.
This way, the two applications can connect without having to communicate directly.
Some people refer to middleware as plumbing since it connects and passes data between two fundamentally different applications.
Middleware has also been referred to as “software glue”, since it helps “glue” together different software so they can work together.
The term middleware is a bit vague since it does not refer to a specific type of software. Instead, it refers to any software that sits between and links two separate applications.
Middleware includes software like content management systems, application servers, web servers, and other similar tools that support the development and delivery of applications. Middleware started becoming popular in the 80s as a solution for enabling newer applications to work on older systems.
To enable communication between different applications, middleware utilizes different communication frameworks such as Representational State Transfer (REST), web services, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and so on.
Modern integration infrastructure such as enterprise service bus (ESB) and API management software also depend on middleware concepts.
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