Middleware 2009 Programming and Software Engineering : Springer : 9783642104442 : 3642104444 : 06 Nov 2009 : This edition marks the tenth Middleware conference. The ?rst conference was held in the Lake District of England in 1998, and its genesis re?ected a growing realization that middleware systems were a unique breed of distributed system requiring their own rigorous research and evaluation. Distributed systems had been around for decades, and the Middleware conference itself resulted from the combination of three previous conferences. But the attempt to build common platforms for many di?erent applications requireda unique combinationofhi- level abstraction and low-level optimization, and presented challenges di?erent from building a monolithic distributed system. Since that ?rst conference, the notion of what constitutes ?middleware? has changed somewhat, and the focus of research papers has changed with it. The ?rst edition focused heavily on distributed objects as a metaphor for