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This edition marks the tenth Middleware conference. The?rst conference was held in the Lake District of England in 1998, and its genesis re?ected a growing realization that middleware systems were a unique breed of distributed system requiring their own rigorous research and evaluation. Distributed systems had been around for decades, and the Middleware conference itself resulted from the combination of three previous conferences. But the attempt to build common platforms for many di?erent applications requireda unique combinationofhi- level abstraction and low-level optimization, and presented challenges di?erent from building a monolithic distributed system. Since that?rst conference, the notion of what constitutes “middleware” has changed somewhat, and the focus of research papers has changed with it. The?rst edition focused heavily on distributed objects as a metaphor for building systems, including six papers with “CORBA” or “ORB” in the title. In f- lowing years, the conference broadened to cover publish/subscribe messaging, peer-to-peer systems, distributed databases, Web services, and automated m- agement, among other topics. Innovative techniques and architectures surfaced in workshops, and expanded to become themes of the main conference, while changes in the industry and advances in other research areas helped to shape research agendas. This tenth edition includes papers on next-generation pl- forms (such as stream systems, pervasive systems and cloud systems), managing enterprise data centers, and platforms for building other platforms, among o- ers.

This volume contains the proceedings of the International Middleware Con- rence, held in Leuven, Belgium during December 1–4, 2008. This year marked the ninth rendition of this annual conference in its current format initially - opted in 1998, aspiring to serve as the premier venue focusing exclusively on important middleware results. A lot has happened over the intervening 10-year span. Middleware has become pervasive in an increasinglyinterconnected world, with its concepts now securely embedded in the notional architectures driving forward the information age. The conference continues to be a focal point for important new initiatives and results for new generations of middleware. With each succeeding year, it has become an even more competitive publishing venue, further extending its selectivity this year as well. Of the 117 submissions, - ly 21 were able to receive acceptance invitations, for an acceptance rate of less than18%. Competitiveindeed. Additionally,thesesubmissionscontinuetocome from all over the globe, spanning authors from 23 countries. A truly world-wide endeavor. But other things have also changed as we turn the corner on the?rst decade of this conference. In many ways, middleware has achieved signi?cant success where it really counts: in terms of technical innovations, advanced capabilities, successful ideas, and?elded systems which permeate society, industry, gov- nment, and academia. With this success comes maturity.