The term middleware refers to the software layer between the operating system and the distributed applications that interact via the networks. The primary mission of a middleware layer is to hide the underlying networked environment's complexity by insulating applications from explicit protocol handling disjoint memories, data replication, network faults, and parallelism.
Mobile middleware translates requests from handheld devices to a host computer and adapts content from the host to the handheld device.
WAP and i-mode
According to an article in Eurotechnology.com, 60 percent of the world's wireless Internet users use i-mode, 39 percent use WAP, and 1 percent use Palm middleware.