RFC 2768 (rfc2768) - Page 3 of 29

Network Policy and Services: A Report of a Workshop on Middleware

RFC 2768          A Report of a Workshop on Middleware     February 2000


   and CIM/DEN-LDAP mapping work, being done in the DMTF. (The recently
   constituted Grid Forum is also pursuing relevant activities.)

   This document also addresses the impact of middleware on Internet
   protocol development. As part of its approach to describing
   middleware, this document has initially focused on the intersections
   among middleware components and application areas that already have
   well defined activities underway.

   This document is a product of an ad hoc Middleware Workshop held on
   December 4-5 1998. The Workshop was organized and sponsored by Cisco,
   Northwestern University's International Center for Advanced Internet
   Research (iCAIR), IBM, and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
   The goal of the workshop was to define the term middleware and its
   requirements on advanced network infrastructures as well as on
   distributed applications. These definitions will enable a set of core
   middleware components to subsequently be specified, both for
   supporting advanced application environments as well as for providing
   a basis for other middleware services.

   Although this document is focused on a greater set of issues than
   just Internet protocols, the concepts and issues put forth here are
   extremely relevant to the way networks and protocols need to evolve
   as we move into the implementation stage of "the network is the
   computer". Therefore, this document is offered to the IETF, DMTF,
   Internet2, Next Generation Internet (NGI), NSF Partnerships for
   Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI), the interagency
   Information Technology for the 21st Century (IT2) program, the Grid
   Forum, the Worldwide Web Consortium, and other communities for their
   consideration.

   This document is organized as follows: Section 1 provides a
   contextual framework. Section 2 defines middleware. Section 3
   discusses application requirements. Subsequent sections discuss
   requirements and capabilities for middleware as defined by
   applications and middleware practitioners. These sections will also
   discuss the required underlying transport infrastructure,
   administrative policy and  management, exemplary core middleware
   components, provisioning issues, network environment and
   implementation issues, and research areas.

1.0 Contextual Framework

   Middleware can be defined to encompass a large set of services. For
   example, we chose to focus initially on the services needed to
   support a common set of applications based on a distributed network
   environment.  A consensus of the Workshop was that there was really
   no core set of middleware services in the sense that all applications



Aiken, et al.                Informational