In order for middleware to be widely useful for distributed, real-time, and embedded systems, it should provide a full set of services and be easily customizable to meet the memory footprint limitations of embedded systems. In this paper, we examine a variety of techniques used to reduce memory footprint in middleware. We found that combining aspect-oriented programming with code shrinkers and obfuscators reduces the memory footprint of CORBA middleware to <5% of its original size, as customized for a small client application for a memoryconstrained embedded device
