What is middleware?
Middleware is the nervous system of distributed systems. It is the technology which enables clients and servers to interact seamlessly across widely differing hardware, software and geographical domains.

The growth of middleware stems from the client/server approach to systems design common in many mainstream applications today. The relationship between clients and servers is analogous of the relationship between customers and suppliers in the real world. In the same way that customers approach suppliers to purchase their product or service, the client interacts with a server to access its available services. Middleware "glues" clients and servers together.

Traditional client/server based systems implemented custom-made, often proprietary, mechanisms to allow interaction between client and server components. Such solutions were often very effective in their original intended role, but commonly proved hard to maintain and build upon when the original requirements for the system changed or grew. As experience with building client/server systems increased throughout the computer software industry, system designers increasingly abstracted the kinds of frameworks they were repeatedly building into standard architectures with a potentially far more generic application.

Standards such as CORBA - the Common Object Request Broker Architecture - emerged from this movement towards generic distribution frameworks. These middleware standards in turn enabled and stimulated the growth of true fully distributed systems - systems that are composed not just of simple clients and servers, but of distributed components collaborating to meet the overall system requirements. Such components commonly act as both clients and servers simultaneously.

Architecture standards
Code Red uses middleware standards such as CORBA and COM/DCOM to build high performance distributed systems and integrate existing systems with one another.

CORBA, for example, is a specification of a framework for communication between software components (often, but not always, objects). Using a CORBA framework, the system designer does not need to be concerned about the actual physical location of the communicating components or how components that wish to communicate locate one another. The Request Broker which forms the heart of the CORBA standard takes care of these complexities. Communicating components can be part of the same program, in different programs on the same machine, or on different machines on a network.

CORBA also includes a platform-neutral language - OMG IDL (Interface Definition Language) - for specifying the services that components offer to other components wishing to communicate with them. This means that the system designer can specify to the middleware framework what a component does, without the need to actually write the code that implements those features. This separation of interface from implementation is the key step in allowing heterogeneous components (written in different languages, running on different hardware platforms) to collaborate. It also allows system designers to readily integrate components from other sources, as long as an IDL interface specification for those components is available.

In short, CORBA and it's peers act like a kind of universal systems glue that binds disparate components together.

Microsoft's COM/DCOM is a proprietary framework providing similar facilities to CORBA in the Microsoft world. Increasingly, the two standards are being made to inter-operate, and where Microsoft NT environments play a significant role, Code Red utilises this capability where necessary.

Heterogeneous environments
A client's existing technology and infrastructure is a major influence on Code Red's choice of middleware technology.

It is a characteristic of the financial environment that technologies are applied to business for known - and often immediate business gain. In many cases, long-term technical compatibility and interoperability are sacrificed for a necessary short term gain.

Code Red accepts this as the distinguishing technical challenge in this field and commands a wide-ranging set of middleware technologies with the highest level of expertise. In addition to CORBA and COM/DCOM we have experience in Neon, IBM MQSeries, IBM CICS and Java RMI. We apply best practice in middleware-driven integration solutions across all these different technologies, choosing the most appropriate subset on a per-client/per-project basis.

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