FORMI

摘要

It is a great pleasure to introduce the ACM/IEEE/IFIP MiddlewareWorkshop Program for Grenoble 2005. This is the fourth time thatMiddleware has included a Workshop Program, and the levels ofinterest and the standard of submissions continue to be extremelyhigh. This year we have five workshops. The Workshop on Adaptiveand Reflective Middleware (ARM05) is our most venerableinstitution, and is now in its fourth incarnation, having startedout at Middleware 2000 in New York and run at every Middlewaresince. Two of the other workshops are also well established, havingrun previously in Rio and Toronto. These are the Workshop onMiddleware for Grid Computing (MGC05), and the Workshop onMiddleware for Pervasive and Ad-hoc Computing (MPAC05). MPAC thisyear is joined by Didier Donsez and his team whose proposal for aworkshop on 'Middleware for Sensor-Based Services' has been mergedinto MPAC. As a consequence, this event is running over two daysrather than the usual one day.>Another workshop thatis continuing a lively tradition is theDoctoral Symposium on Middleware. This popular event has workedparticularly well in the past and represents a wonderfulopportunity for young reseachers in our field to present their workto a mock thesis committee of mentors and to receive valuable andsupportive feeback. This year we also have a new workshop: the 1stWorkshop on Aspect Oriented Middleware Development (AOMD05). Thishighlights what seems to be a promising area of synergisticresearch that has recently been receiving a lot of attention. Welook forward to a productive dialogue on the relationship betweenaspectisation techniques and middleware techniques.>Middleware provides a robust and flexible abstraction forconnecting applications together. As connectivity is the majoraspect addressed in middleware, historically middleware isimplemented as monolithic software targeted to specificenvironments and application domains. As a result, older middlewareimplementations can only perform satisfactorily in theirtargetenviroments and often can not be used in other types ofapplications. This inflexibility can usually be attributed tomiddleware implementations' inability to adapt the behaviors orstructure of the platforms to the requirements of changingenvironments and application domains.>In recent years, researchers have been experimenting with andapplying adaptive and reflective techniques such as reflection,component-based software engineering, software architecture designpatterns and component frameworks, to extend the applicationdomains for middleware. The trend can easily be observed inmiddleware tailored for large-scale enterprise applications wherediverse infrastructure and applications are becoming common-place.Similarly, middleware is being applied to new areas such as mobilecomputing, distributed multimedia, and distributed real-time andembedded (DRE) systems, where resources are either constrained orhave changing availability over time. Applying adaptive andreflective techniques to middleware has shown to provide a greaterdegree of configurability and dynamic adaptability forapplications.>This is the 4th of a series of workshops on Adaptive andReflective Middleware (ARM). Past workshops contributed to theadvancement of middleware research by providing researchers venuesfor exchanging leading-edge views and presenting state-of-the-artstudies in the area. Building on the success of past workshops,this workshop aims to further the application of adaptive andreflective middleware techniques to a variety of new applicationdomains, and to support different Quality of Service (QoS)requirements in middleware.>Because of the positive feedback we got from last year'sworkshop, we are expanding the panel discussion session. However,this decision has made paper selection an even harder processbecause we were forced to omit many good papers with exciting ideasfrom presentation in the workshop program. Fortunately, manyauthors of these nice papers gracefully accepted our invitations topresent their work as posters so that we will not miss out on theirgood work. For that, the organizing committee would like to expressour sincere gratitude.>Papers selected for the workshop program represent the mainthrusts in Adaptive and Reflective Middleware research. They coverthe popular research areas such as aspect and resource managementtechniques in ARM using composition and reconfiguration. Thesetechniques are being applied at various levels in middlewareimplementations, from infrastructure design to supporting specificaspects in the class of applications.