As commonly used, the term usually applies to major software products such as database managers, transaction monitors, Web servers, and so forth. Subsystem is another term often used for this type of software. These software products are usually licensed programs, although there are notable exceptions, such as the HTTP Server.
As this Forum deals mainly with Mainframes let's talk about zOS related middleware. Typical z/OS middleware includes:
- Database systems
- Web servers
- Message queueing and routing functions
- Transaction managers
- Java™ virtual machines
- Extensible Markup Language (XML) processing functions.