What is middleware?

[Moscow Mule]

Anything that allows one thing to talk to another thing on a different box is middleware.

Ideally, there would only be one flavour on any one site. Sadly, that is seldom the case...

[Robinho]

Ok finally it's the "additional" column.

God i ******* hate these things.

[stek]

It depends on what context it is used. It is generally a piece of software that is used as an interface between 2 environments, may be software and hardware, or between 2 different pieces of software.

Yep, can be hardware, such as those fecking Sarvegas....

For me tho, I'd say generally it's Message Queue or Meta Directory.....

[Old Hack]

Anything that could sit between your application and database, a metadata handler, whatever, could be construed as middle ware. I said ADO wasn't middleware, but it could be construed as middleware, as could com, etc.

[Spacecadet]

What is middleware?

Crockery from Middle Earth

[Pondlife]

My pants.

[NotAllThere]

A way of making it even more difficult to find out where the point of failure is when data is sent from one system to another, but seems not to arrive.

[Robinho]

My pants.

Well that's something nobody has any experience with.

[stek]

And if you look in IIS, the middleware bit is all the snooker balls spinning about.....

[farout117]

And if you look in IIS, the middleware bit is all the snooker balls spinning about.....

I always thought "middleware" in .NET terms was something that connects the front-end to the database, could be WCF, an ORM, or even ADO.NET.