From the Editor in Chief: Middleware´s Shrinking Middle

The rise of SOA and PGAS doesn´t quite spell the end of Corba, RMI, and other classic distributed-object systems, but it does increasingly restrict their ranges of use. These technologies surely still play major roles in enterprise-integration systems and heterogeneous intranet applications and niches such as real-time Corba, as well as the countless existing deployments that remain with us for years. They might even reemerge as the approach of choice in future grid computing frameworks that must sometimes straddle administrative domains. But the idea that one approach to object-oriented middleware could serve all needs seems to be one whose time has come and gone