It was only a matter of time before someone deployed a middleware-as-a-service offering for developers. A startup company called Linxter is in the final stages of rolling out what it calls an Internet Service Bus that allows any application running on any device to share data with any other application across the Internet.

Oddly enough, you might have though that Microsoft or IBM would be taking the lead when it comes to creating a middleware service on the Internet. Instead, a small team of people led by Linxter CEO Jason Milgram has come together to create a new approach to making middleware services available to developers over the Internet.

The service is designed so developers can dynamically add and remove applications and devices that they want to connect to the service. Developers can also set ranges of performance that can be used to prioritize certain messages over others based on the latency needs of the application.

Linxter is still working out the exact pricing model, but it plans to offer two tiers based on usage that allows developers to pay for the service as they use it or via a dedicated fee model for a specific set of services. Linxter also plans to allow customers to purchase a version of its middleware offering that they can deploy on their own premises if they so desire.

Milgram says that the need for a middleware service in the cloud is just becoming apparent to developers that need something that is more flexible and less intensive to set up. That capability will become especially important as more machine-to-machine applications running on embedded systems get connected across the Internet.

In the meantime, the advent of a middleware service in the cloud should give developers a new set of options for creating Web-based applications that can connect to just about any device out there. And with that capability, we're probably going to see a lot more of those types of applications coming from smaller teams of developers that no longer have to think about how they might build out the complex communications infrastructure needed to support their applications. Instead, they can alternatively plug into a middleware utility that now provides a higher level of abstraction for integrating applications and devices.