Middleware has a key role in modern and object-oriented robotics frameworks, which aim at developing reusable, scalable and maintainable systems using different platforms and programming languages. However, complex robotics software falls into the category of distributed real-time systems with stringent requirements in terms of throughput, latency and jitter. This paper introduces and analyzes a methodology to improve an existing robotics framework with real-time and high-performance features using a recently adopted standard: the Data Distribution Service (DDS).