Presenters: Prof Ian Gorton, Dr Anna Liu, CSIRO Software Architectures and Component Technologies Group, University of Sydney

Abstract

Software architects are faced with many complex technical decisions concerning middleware as they design and build enterprise scale systems. In this tutorial, we will highlight some of the major problems and issues in middleware technology selection and deployment. The focus will be on CORBA, COM+ and J2EE based technologies.

We will show how the outcomes of these design decisions leads to architectural trade-offs which can have dramatic effects on the performance, scalability and cost of the deployed solution. The tutorial will demonstrate the effects of these trade-offs by presenting some of the latest results from CSIRO's Middleware Technology Evaluation (MTE) project, which is providing independent, rigorous evaluations of the spectrum of middleware technology.