Contents
Preface
Committees
Additional readers
Index of contributors
Sponsors
Back cover
How to buy
Preface
Welcome to Middleware'98 and to one of England's most beautiful regions.
In recent years, the distributed systems community has witnessed a growth in the number of conferences, leading to difficulties in tracking the literature and a consequent loss of awareness of work done by others in this important field. The aim of Middleware'98 is to synthesise many of the smaller workshops and conferences in this area, bringing together research communities which were becoming fragmented.
The conference has been designed to maximise the experience for attendees. This is reflected in the choice of a resort venue (rather than a big city) to ensure a strong focus on interaction with other distributed systems researchers. The programme format incorporates a question-and-answer panel in each session, enabling significant issues to be discussed in the context of related papers and presentations. The invited speakers and tutorials are intended to not only inform the attendees, but also to stimulate discussion and debate.
The key to a good conference is a strong technical programme and this can only be achieved by having a significant number of submissions and a diligent programme committee. Since the composition of the programme committee also influences the submission rate, the role of these individuals is doubly important. In assembling the programme committee, we brought together researchers well-known for their expertise, experience, and leadership in distributed systems research. Our dedicated committee was vital to the creation of a successful programme for Middleware'98, as the conference attracted over 150 technical submissions including 135 full paper submissions. Each was review at least 3 times, resulting in over 500 review. The final acceptance ratio for Middleware technical papers was a little over 1 in 5.
The programme presented here reflects the state of the art in middleware research, addressing issues sycg as ORB architectures, engineering of large-scale systems, and multimedia. The traditional role of middleware as a point of integration and service provision has remained intact, but there is a clear emphasis on emerging "must-have" features such as extensibility, mobility, and quality of service.
Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to thank the numerous people who have made this conference possible and, in particular, the General Chair, Gordon Blair, for offering us the opportunity to serve as Programme Co-chairs for the conference, the Local Arrangements Chair, Geoff Coulson, the Tutorials Chair, Richard Sinnott and the Publicity Chair, John Bates. Special thanks are also due to Steve Wade for his help with the conference web site and Jochen Seitz for his tremendous contribution to the editing of these proceedings.
Nigel Davies
Kerry Rayond
Programme Co-chairs.