Middleware Finds Its Mojo Again.

This article looks at advances in applications and middleware in the computer industry in 2005. The maturity and acceptance of Web services contributed to transition. Factors that held back adoption include the lack of standards, the competing consortia, and uncertainty on how to integrate services into enterprises. In 2005, Web services began to settle down to hard work, standards firmed up, and two critical technologies, enterprise service bus (ESB) and service oriented application, drove adoption of services. ESB performs intelligent routing and the necessary transformations of data.