Designing and architecting new routing protocols is an expensive task, because they are complex systems managing distributed network state, in order to create and maintain the routing databases. Existing routing protocol implementations are compact, bundling together a database, an optimal path calculation algorithm and a network state distribution mechanism. The aim of this paper is to present a middleware-based approach for designing and managing routing protocols based on the idea of decomposing routing protocols into fundamental building blocks and identifying the role of each component, and also to propose a framework for composing dynamically new routing protocols making use of a distributed object platform.