Defining Good Middleware

Yesterday, Kyle Wilson (Day 1 Studios) posted a "Defining Good Middleware” opinion piece on Gamasutra.com.

It is a good, direct, cogent little piece of writing better and more succinct than most of the "buy versus build" seminars I've endured over the past decade.

Wilson discusses several attributes of "Good Middleware", including:

• Provides you with more code than you could write yourself for a fraction of what it would cost you to try
• Offers structure ("Middleware draws a line between the things that you have to worry about and the things you don’t")
• Lets you hook your own memory allocator
• Lets you hook your own I/O functions
• Has extensible functionality
• Avoids symbol conflicts
• Is explicit about its thread safety
• Fits into your data pipeline
• Is stable
• Gives you source code

Using Wilson's article as a starting point, Gamebryo architect Vincent Scheib posits, "Is Gamebryo Good Middleware?"

Fortunately, the answer is Gamebryo is good middleware. Very good middleware.

Give it a read, and let me know what you think.