Editorial message: special track on dependable and adaptive distributed systems

Distributed systems and databases are at the core of the information society and increasingly pervade many aspects of our daily lives. While mobility and pervasiveness require support for systems that adapt themselves to changing environments, the middleware infrastructures become more and more heterogeneous and complex. In addition, we can see an increasing demand for dependability of such systems, taking into account the software as well as the surrounding environment. Generally, adaptiveness can either satisfy a change in user requirements or seek to fulfill the same requirements in a changing system context and environment. In particular, adaptation is also a means to achieve dependability in a computing infrastructure with dynamically varying structure and properties. Fault tolerance can consequently be seen as a special case, where the adaptation seeks to overcome an otherwise negative effect of a change in the computing infrastructure that can be classified as a fault. However, dependability can not only be achieved by fault tolerance, but also by other means like fault avoidance (e.g. through formal methods). Therefore, future middleware needs to support adaptiveness and dependability while maintaining scalability and mastering complexity. Still, software legacy must be integrated in a way, such that open and standardized interfaces support not only functional integration, but also a seamless integration of non-functional aspects. Moreover, service-oriented architectures need coordination in order to achieve dependability and can further benefit from context-aware approaches.