Data Distributed Service (DDS) from the Object Management Group represents the next generation of industrial middleware standards, bringing a data-centric publish-subscribe paradigm to distributed control systems. In comparison with existing middleware technologies, the data-centric approach is able to provide a consistent consolidated model supporting the different data dissemination scenarios and integrating many important issues, such as user-specific types, quality of service, data stream management and others. The paper highlights the different features of the DDS technology and introduces a prototype of the NSLS-II high level application environment including key middle layer servers, such as Machine, Online Model and Virtual Accelerator. The proposed environment is developed and evaluated on top of EPICS-DDS, an open source implementation of the DDS standard interface based on the EPICS Channel Access protocol (http://sourceforge.net/projects/epics-dds/).