21 Sep
1999
21 Sep
'99
9:18 p.m.
That is the best definition of middleware I have ever heard. We need a zope dictionary filled with honest, modestly irreverant, direct, and cut-through-the-hype definitions like this.
* It's a goofy term much loved by marketdroids and journalists and CORBA people. It denotes server apps that sit in a "middle tier" of an n-tiered distributed system (such as a web-based database front-end, which is positioned between the client and the database server). Middleware is an euphemism for what programmers sometimes call "glue" or "this little Perl/Python script I chucked up last night" or, these days, "this nifty bunch of Z Classes that drive our internal document management system".
karl