Middle means a place in between two things. A middleman is some guy who gets your money and goes somewhere else to buy the thing and then give the thing to you.


Middleware is between the user applications and old system. For example, the Web platform software provides a means for users to use Web browser to remotely use the old systems in an enterprise.


Is grid platform software a middleware or an grid operating system? Who knows. The concept is new and we’ll see what term will be accepted eventually. Grid platform provides a platfom for a user to submit a job and gets the job done by many remote applications, with the back-end systems transparant to the user. Perhaps it is better to call grid software “middleware”, not “grid operating system”.