Interoperability and Middleware Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Interoperability and Middleware - Research Paper Example This was aimed at improving the service offered by the ICT sector. After this development, the ICT sector became more comprehensive and demanded more research and advancements on telecommunications and computing network flexibility (Lerner, 2002). Today interoperability standards are applied in ICT world to improve effective communication compatibility, exchange of data and services. The smooth interaction between two or more components of the operating software for communication compatibility, services and data exchange can be termed as inter-operatibility. Interoperability is a necessity in ICT because it is a tool that increases the connectivity of computers via the internet and offers a solution to operational costs. Furthermore, its software has been proved to be of quality provided heterogeneity is maintained, for instance, on systems written in different language programming; running on different hardware programs and operating system; using different data representation; impl ementing unlike syntactic or semantics interpretations; and using different control platforms (Puder, Ro?mer & Pilhofer, 2006) For interoperability heterogeneity to be realized there has to be a middleware software package. Today, there are many telecommunication and computation industries that offer middle ware products. The industry built middleware product essentially develops a connector that makes interoperability system to configure for use. Middle ware refers to application software that serves the purpose of a transition layer or exchange of resources between two networked counterparts. It also merges and incorporates two networked counterparts to communicate with each other either running on the same or different platforms. Middleware software applications are divided into two major categories, application management and resource management. In application management invokes specific services that perform given tasks for them. This application management is also divided int o other two categories, the higher and the lower, that is dependent on the level of service abstraction the middleware offers. The lower application known as inter-application management communication middleware operates with remote procedure calls in general while the higher application middleware totally abstracts the network by substituting procedure calls with direct service calls. The second middleware category, resource management, acts as resource management utility. Just like the first category it is divided into two groups, higher and lower resource management dependent on the type of resource managed by the middleware. The higher resource, also referred to as database middleware, manages software related resources such as transaction processing and database access as these resources are related to the database while lower resource middleware manager, also known as resource middleware, manages hardware related resources like CPU, hard drive space and memory (Puder, Ro?mer & Pilhofer, 2006). At the time of manufacture its main aim was to set up new standards of addressing the issue of differences that occur due to heterogeneous networks. It also provided for grid distinctive characteristics like file sharing, processor and additional grid functionalities such as API (application programming interfaces) with a primary concern aimed in resource