Middleware 2005 ; ACM/IFIP/USENIX 6th International Middleware Conference, Grenoble, France, November 28 - December 2, 2005, Proceedings

Today, middleware is a key part of almost any application. Gone are the days when middleware was only used in the IT industry for high-end applications. Rather than middleware being part of the IT world, today IT applications r- resent only one aspect of middleware. With the increase in distribution, network capacity, and widespread deployment of computing devices (in homes, auto- biles, mobile phones, etc.), middleware has surpassed the importance of operating systems as the platform where application development and deployment take place. This makes middleware very exciting as a research area but also a very challenging one since it encompasses many different concepts and techniques from a wide varietyof ?elds: networking, distributed systems, softwareengine- ing, performance analysis, computer architecture, and data management. Middleware 2005 in Grenoble, France, was the 6th edition of an increasingly successfulconference.The scope of the conference has been slowly widening with every edition to accommodate new ?elds and applications.