The sociolinguistic concept of ‘community’ has undergone profound changes since it was first introduced in the middle of the twentieth century. Originally conceived to describe groups of individuals and families with shared traditions and a long history of living and working closely together (think of a village or an urban neighbourhood), the concept has now expanded to include a variety of ways in which people can connect with each other: attachments which are often longdistance, transitory, mobile, multiple. As we shall see, developments in sociolinguistic ideas about community to some extent parallel perceived changes in the real world, given the quickening pace of globalisation, the shake-up of traditional structures and sources of authority, the greater possibility for mobility, and people’s increasing ability to use digital communications to establish networks beyond their immediate vicinity. If we look at how …

Middleware platforms typically provide a series of services that must be composed and configured according to the target run-time environment. Often, interactions occur between these services that can cause run-time errors when these services conflict or dependencies are not fulfilled. This paper aims to manage these interaction issues in an Aspect-Oriented middleware platform by allowing interaction contracts between services to be specified which then are enforced at run-time. Our approach was validated by applying it to a series of interaction issues that were discovered when implementing middleware services in our prototype Aspect-Oriented middleware platform - custAOMWare.