Video 1: What is Middleware?

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Del curso dictado por University of New Mexico

Web Application Development: Basic Concepts

128 calificaciones

University of New Mexico

Web Application Development: Basic Concepts

128 calificaciones

This is the first course in a Coursera Specialization track involving Web Application Architectures. This course will give you the basic background, terminology and fundamental concepts that you need to understand in order to build modern full stack web applications. A full stack web developer is familiar with each "layer" of the software technologies involved in a web application, including data modeling and database technologies, the web server environment and middleware components, network protocols, the user interface and basic visual design and user interaction concepts. In this course we will learn by doing. We will start by learning the major components of web application architectures, along with the fundamental design patterns and philosophies that are used to organize them. You will build and continually refine a fully functional full-stack web application as we progress through the modules in this course. Along the way you will be exposed to agile software development practices, numerous tools that software engineers are expected to know how to use, and a modern web application development framework. This course is also available in Spanish. To join the Spanish version, visit this page: https://www.coursera.org/learn/apliweb.

De la lección

Module #4 - Middleware

Middleware is an abstraction layer that hides details about hardware devices and other lower-level software services from an application. Middleware services implement common low-level functions, such as communication with the operating system, application servers, database servers, etc., so that application developers do not need to concern themselves with these details, and can instead focus on the application functionality they are trying to provide. In a web application, these services generally make use of the HTTP protocol, and in a web application framework, the MVC design pattern can be thought of as being implemented over the middleware.

Middleware an Introduction - An Overview0:33

Video 1: What is Middleware?2:47

Video 2: Middleware in Web Apps11:47

Video 3: Middleware Frameworks9:44

Conoce a los instructores

Greg Heileman
Professor and Associate Provost
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Manel Martínez-Ramón
Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering

[MUSIC]

What is Middleware?

The term middleware was first used in the field of distributed systems.

A distributed computing system consists of a collection of computers

that communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages back and

forth to one another over a network.

So a web application is just a special case of a distributed computing system.

Let's take a look at where the services that provided in middleware

appear in our canonical web application architecture.

So middleware is basically the green

areas that I'm showing you here in our web application architecture.

So in this portion of the architecture,

we're concerned with the receipt of the request via the HTTP protocol.

Passing that request onto the scripts code and

other services that lie at the heart of your web application.

The processing of the request, which may involve interfacing with the data tier,

and finally, preparing the response that would be supplied

back to the user on the client side.

So, the point of middleware is to provide a set of services that do these things for

you, so that you, as a programmer, don't have to worry about the mundane

aspects of web applications, such as the web server and application server.

You want to focus on those aspects of the web application

that will set it apart from other applications.

So notice, by the way, that the model view controller design pattern is

implemented over the middleware.

All of the processes that I just mentioned are used by this design pattern.

So we'll spend some time later in this lesson understanding exactly how

the monoview controller design pattern uses middleware components.

So at a high level then, what is Middleware?

Well, you can think of it as the software glue that binds

together the set of services within the center of our web application architecture

that allows your application code to interact with the web server.

For this reason, people sometimes refer to it as the dash in the term client-server.

I should also mention that these services generally are not available as a part of

the underlying operating system.

In fact, that's why it's necessary to build middleware services.

Because of these services, processes running on different machines within

a distributed application can more easily communicate with one another.

So as a programmer, you don't need to dig into

all of the complexities associated with computers communicating over networks.

You just need to understand the interfaces provided by the middleware services.

In the next lecture, we'll start talking about some of the specific middleware

components in web applications.

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