EgoSpaces: facilitating rapid development of context-aware mobile applications

Today's mobile applications require constant adaptation to their changing environments, or contexts. Technological advances have increased the pervasiveness of mobile computing devices such as laptops, handhelds, and embedded sensors. The sheer amount of context information available for adaptation places a heightened burden on application developers as they must manage and utilize vast amounts of data from diverse sources. Facilitating programming in this data-rich environment requires a middleware that provides context information to applications in an abstract form. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of such a middleware that allows programmers to focus on high-level interactions among programs and to employ declarative abstract context specifications in settings that exhibit transient interactions with opportunistically encountered components. We also discuss the novel context-aware abstractions the middleware provides and the programming knowledge necessary to write applications using it. Finally, we provide examples demonstrating the infrastructure's ability to support differing tasks from a wide variety of application domains.     

A pluggable middleware architecture for developing context-aware mobile applications

The proliferation of powerful smartphone devices provides a great opportunity for context-aware mobile applications becoming mainstream. However, we argue that conventional software development techniques suffer because of the added complexity required for collecting and managing context information. This paper presents a component-based middleware architecture which facilitates the development and deployment of context-aware applications via reusable components. The main contribution of this approach is the combination of a development methodology with the middleware architecture, which together bring significant value to developers of context-aware applications. Further contributions include the following: The methodology utilizes separation of concerns, thus decreasing the developmental cost and improving the productivity. The design and implementation of context-aware applications are also eased via the use of reusable components, called context plug-ins. Finally, the middleware architecture facilitates the deployment and management of the context plug-ins in a resource-aware manner. The proposed methodology and middleware architecture are evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively.     

A knowledge-based framework for extracting components in agile systems development

Considerable strides have been made in the use of components in software development. Many proprietary enterprise resource planning (ERP) software environments use modular components to develop and customize “best practices” to meet a specific organizational need. In agile application development, many developers and users are asked to design systems in a short period of time. These applications may use components that are embedded in software repositories. The challenge then is how to select the right software components (data and procedures) to meet an application requirement. Although experienced developers may select and customize components to meet the needs of an application, such expertise may not be available to other applications. This paper presents a knowledge-based framework to select and customize software components and demonstrates its value in deriving quality specifications, even when the developers are relatively inexperienced.     

Utilizing architectural styles to enhance the adaptation support of middleware platforms

ContextModern middleware platforms provide the applications deployed on top of them with facilities for their adaptation. However, the level of adaptation support provided by the state-of-the-art middleware solutions is often limited to dynamically loading and off-loading of software components. Therefore, it is left to the application developers to handle the details of change such that the system’s consistency is not jeopardized.ObjectiveWe aim to change the status quo by providing the middleware facilities necessary to ensure the consistency of software after adaptation. We would like these facilities to be reusable across different applications, such that the middleware can streamline the process of achieving safe adaptation.MethodOur approach addresses the current shortcomings by utilizing the information encoded in a software system’s architectural style. This information drives the development of reusable adaptation patterns. The patterns specify both the exact sequence of changes and the time at which those changes need to occur. We use the patterns to provide advanced adaptation support on top of an existing architectural middleware platform.ResultsOur experience shows the feasibility of deriving detailed adaptation patterns for several architectural styles. Applying the middleware to adapt two real-world software systems shows the approach is effective in consistently adapting these systems without jeopardizing their consistency.ConclusionWe conclude the approach is effective in alleviating the application developers from the responsibility of managing the adaptation process at the application-level. Moreover, we believe this study provides the foundation for changing the way adaptation support is realized in middleware solutions.     

A lightweight and distributed middleware to provide presence awareness in mobile ubiquitous systems

Several researchers have identified the need to count on presence awareness in ubiquitous systems that support mobile activities, particularly when these systems are used to perform loosely-coupled mobile work. In such a work style, mobile users conduct face-to-face on-demand interactions, therefore counting on awareness information about the position and availability of potential collaborators becomes mandatory for these applications. Most proposed solutions that provide user presence awareness involve centralized components, have reusability limitations, or simply address a part of that service. This article presents a lightweight and fully distributed middleware named Moware, which allows developers to embed presence awareness services in mobile ubiquitous systems in a simple way. The article also describes the Moware architecture, its main components and strategies used to deal with several aspects of the presence awareness support. These design strategies can be reused by software designers to provide presence awareness capabilities into middleware and specific software applications. Moware services were embedded in a mobile ubiquitous system that supports inspectors during the construction inspection process. The preliminary results indicate that the middleware was easy to use for developers, and its services were useful for the end-users.     

Deriving Long-Term Value from Context-Aware Computing

Modern businesses are increasingly dynamic in nature, which creates a need for computer systems that can sense and respond to rapid changes in the environment, or “context,” of the enterprise. This article presents the authors' vision of a context “ecosystem” that helps enterprises, applications, and developers respond to these dynamic changes and derive long-term value from context information. the ecosystem includes providers of raw context information, components that derive more abstract context information from lower level sources, middleware that provides systematic context services to applications, development tools, and contextaware applications.     

Middleware for Internet of Things: Survey and Challenges

The Internet of things (IoT) applications span many potential fields. Furthermore, smart homes, smart cities, smart vehicular networks, and healthcare are very attractive and intelligent applications. In most of these applications, the system consists of smart objects that are equipped by sensors and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and may rely on other technological computing and paradigm solutions such as M2M (machine to machine) computing, Wifi, Wimax, LTE, cloud computing, etc. Thus, the IoT vision foresees that we can shift from traditional sensor networks to pervasive systems, which deliver intelligent automation by running services on objects. Actually, a significant attention has been given to designing a middleware that supports many features; heterogeneity, mobility, scalability, multiplicity, and security. This papers reviews the-state-of-the-art techniques for IoT middleware systems and reveals an interesting classification for these systems into service and agent-oriented systems. Therefore two visions have emerged to provide the IoT middleware systems: Via designing the middleware for IoT system as an eco-system of services or as an eco-system of agents. The most common feature of the two approaches is the ability to overcome heterogeneity issues. However, the agent approach provides context awareness and intelligent elements. The review presented in this paper includes a detailed comparison between the IoT middleware approaches. The paper also explores challenges that form directions for future research on IoT middleware systems. Some of the challenges arise, because some crucial features are not provided (or at most partially provided) by the existing middleware systems, while others have not been yet tackled by current research in IoT.     

ID-Services: an RFID middleware architecture for mobile applications

The use of RFID middleware to support application development for and integration of RFID hardware into information systems has become quite common in RFID applications where reader devices remain stationary, which currently represents the largest part of all RFID applications in use. Another field for applying RFID technology which is offering a huge set of novel possibilities and applications are mobile applications, where readers are no longer fixed. In order to address the specific issues of mobile RFID-enabled applications and to support developers in rapid application development, we present ID-Services, an architecture for an RFID middleware that is designed to support mobile applications. The ID-Services approach has been used to implement MoVIS (Mobile Visitor Information System), a mobile application which allows museum visitors to request individually adapted multimedia information about exhibits in an intuitive way.     

一种中间件服务容错配置管理方法

提出一种基于运行时刻软件体系结构的容错管理方法,支持开发者和管理员针对不同中间件服务失效定制合适的故障检测和修复机制.首先,运行时刻软件体系结构自动构造构件依赖视图和错误传播①视图,为理解和分析整个系统的可靠性提供全局视图;然后,操作运行时刻软件体系结构配置容错机制;最后利用AOP技术将容错机制插装到中间件中,使其具备指定的容错能力.上述过程在一个可视化工具的辅助下半自动实施,并在J2EE中间件上得到验证.     

A middleware‐transparent approach to developing distributed applications

An innovative middleware‐transparent approach to developing distributed applications is presented. The approach uses an aspect‐oriented software development technique to separate an application's middleware‐independent functionality from its middleware‐specific functionality. Application elements that are specific to the middleware are localized in aspects that can be seamlessly integrated into middleware‐independent application designs. The middleware‐transparent approach is used to decouple business functionality from middleware‐specific functionality. The decoupling allows developers to change middleware application elements without significantly modifying business functionality. Middleware technologies such as Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Jini, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) remote procedure call (RPC) and .Net are used as examples to illustrate the approach. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Middleware challenges ahead

Middleware research and development has reached the end of its first major phase, and new requirements are arising that are so fundamentally different that they will lead to new-generation middleware systems. Facing dynamic modifications in distributed systems technology, middleware developers are striving to support applications that meet the technical challenges of ubiquitous computing     

Using Bytecode Instruction Counting as Portable CPU Consumption Metric

Accounting for the CPU consumption of applications is crucial for software development to detect and remove performance bottlenecks (profiling) and to evaluate the performance of algorithms (benchmarking). Moreover, extensible middleware may exploit resource consumption information in order to detect a resource overuse of client components (detection of denial-of-service attacks) or to charge clients for the resource consumption of their deployed components. The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is a predominant target platform for application and middleware developers, but it currently lacks standard mechanisms for resource management.In this paper we present a tool, the Java Resource Accounting Framework, Second Edition (J-RAF2), which enables precise CPU management on standard Java runtime environments. J-RAF2 employs a platform-independent CPU consumption metric, the number of executed JVM bytecode instructions. We explain the advantages of this approach to CPU management and present five case studies that show the benefits in different settings.     

An object-based middleware supporting efficient interoperability on a smart home network

This paper proposes a novel object-based home network middleware for supporting the interoperability among home devices and smart grid devices. This middleware provides various types of abstract objects for flexible representation of heterogeneous home devices, which are classified based on their characteristics. It is also flexible enough to allow addition of new protocols and message conversion between different protocols through an abstraction layer, which are not supported by existing home network middlewares so that various protocols can be supported. As a result, it can be utilized to provide the interoperability among a variety of devices from sensors to typical home appliances as well as smart grid devices such as a home electric generator and a battery, which adopt different protocols. In order to demonstrate that home devices and smart grid devices are interoperable through the proposed middleware, we implement applications based on the middleware on a target platform consisting of embedded boards, sensors and laptops for emulation purposes of a home network. According to our emulation, this middleware can provide efficient interoperability among home devices and smart grid devices for future energy efficient home.     

QRTP: A Middleware for Broadband Networks

Broadband networks, such as those based on Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), provide large bandwidth and multiple services. An essential application area for broadband networks is multimedia systems. The development of multimedia applications, however, is currently lagging behind the advances in the network technology. Our approach to the problem of more effectively developing multimedia applications is to provide developers with a middleware that encompasses a set of broadband-specific services needed by multimedia applications, for instance virtual connection setup, bandwidth reservation and session synchronization. Our middleware, called the Queen's Real-time Transport Protocol (QRTP), is based on the Real-time Transport Protocol standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force. The paper discuses the design, implementation and evaluation of the QRTP middleware.     

Context-aware RAON middleware for opportunistic network

Application development and deployment on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) is a major challenge in the widespread use of MANET. The increasing D2D communication in 5G networks has renewed interest in an effective middleware design for MANET where application developers face various challenges such as unstable connectivity, high error rate, mobility induced disruption and disconnection, and limited battery power. We find that unstructured overlay network provides a good abstraction to facilitate application development and deployment on MANET. In this paper, we present the design of a middleware that builds a Resource-Aware Overlay Network (RAON), which is an unstructured overlay network of nodes engaged in the application that employs a query–reply mechanism for resource discovery. RAON is enhanced with features such as proactive neighbor replacement, congestion-aware data download and cooperative caching. Simulation results show that these features are effective in reducing query delay, improving data availability, and balancing node power consumption with protocol performance. We also present the middleware software design that offers the API based on node and path abstractions to applications. The middleware implements a generic context framework for acquiring device and user context. We discuss the implementation of application-level multicast and credit-based file-sharing applications using the middleware API. The middleware is implemented in Java J2ME on Android, which is tested in an ad hoc network of Nexus 7 devices running OLSR.     

Generic support for distributed applications

In the late 1980s, software designers introduced middleware platforms to support distributed computing systems. Since then, the rapid evolution of technology has caused an explosion of distributed-processing requirements. Application developers now routinely expect to support multimedia systems and mobile users and computers. Timely response to asynchronous events is crucial to such applications, but current platforms do not adequately meet this need. Another need of existing and emerging applications is the secure interoperability of independent services in large-scale, widely distributed systems. Information systems serving organizations such as universities, hospitals, and government agencies require cross-domain interaction. To meet the needs of these applications, Cambridge University researchers developed middleware extensions that provide a flexible, scalable approach to distributed-application development. This article details the extensions they developed, explaining their distributed software approach and the support it has provided for emerging applications     

Ruby Extensions

Using languages such as Ruby for middleware integration projects is straightforward when developers can create pure dynamic language applications that access preexisting services, even though such services (often considered "legacy") are typically implemented in "traditional" middleware languages such as Java, C++, or C. Are dynamic languages like Ruby still useful in situations that require directly coupling the dynamic code to the legacy code? Here, Vinoski explores what it takes to cleanly integrate Ruby into an existing C++ middleware system.     

基于JDBC驱动扩展OGSA-DAI访问数据库的探讨

网格计算如今变得越来越流行,但这并不意味着它是易于使用,部署和开发的。 OGSA-DAI是一款能够在网格中开发和管理数据库的中间件。我们目前所做的工作是用SUN公司JDBC接口的一个应用来扩展OGSA-DAI的网格中间件,使用Java语言来访问数据库。本次应用使用OGSA的代客户端API ,目的是提供一种简单而众所周知的方法,使新的和现有的开发人员及应用程序能够在网格中使用OGSA-DAI中间件来操作数据库。