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Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development IX pp 123–167Cite as

Abstracting Context in Event-Based Software

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((TAOSD,volume 7271))

Abstract

With the recent immersion of advanced mobile devices in the daily lives of millions, pervasive computing is becoming a reality. Developing pervasive software systems is inherently difficult though it requires to deal with heterogeneous infrastructure besides peer-to-peer communication and device mobility. Thus, programming support for such applications must provide loose coupling between different participants, as well as loose coupling between applications and communication protocols. Event-based programming provides an appealing paradigm to decouple participants, however many event-based systems and languages have hardwired communication protocols, which limits their adaptability to heterogeneous deployment environments.

In this paper we address this issue by abstracting the context in which events are created and handled, including protocols used to convey, compose, and consume these events. More precisely, we propose to extend an event-based programming model with context aspects – conspects for short. We demonstrate the elegant usage of conspects through several examples based on their implementation in EventJava and illustrate how they allow to modularize event-based pervasive software. We also provide a thorough empirical investigation of the performance overheads and benefits of conspects, including the costs of weaving them dynamically. Through empirical evaluations, we assess the benefits of conspects for switching protocols without any changes to the base applications through three case studies with EventJava. The three studies are (1) a tornado monitoring system deployed on different architectures ranging from desktop x86 to embedded LEON3, (2) a mobile social networking suite with protocols for different scenarios, and (3) the introduction of a novel adaptive communication protocol in our mobile social network suite as well as in a novel robotic swarm application.

This research is partially funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation through project number PBLAP2-127668 and by the US NSF through grants 0644013 and 0834529 as well as through DARPA grant number N11AP20014.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Polytechnique Montréal, Montréal, Québec, H3C 3A7, Canada

    Adrian Holzer

  2. Fiji Systems Inc, Indianapolis, IN, 46202, USA

    Lukasz Ziarek

  3. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Lukasz Ziarek, K. R. Jayaram & Patrick Eugster

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  1. Adrian Holzer
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  2. Lukasz Ziarek
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  3. K. R. Jayaram
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  4. Patrick Eugster
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Central Florida, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 439C Harris Center, Building 116, 4000 Central Florida Boulevard,, 32816-2362,, Orlando,, FL, USA

    Gary T. Leavens

  2. Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, 113-8656, Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Japan

    Shigeru Chiba

  3. Oracle Labs, Oracle Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG, Schiffbauergasse 14, 14467, Potsdam, Germany

    Michael Haupt

  4. University of Marburg, Biegenstr. 10, 35037, Marburg, Germany

    Klaus Ostermann

  5. University of British Columbia, 2366 Main Mall, V6K 389, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Eric Wohlstadter

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Holzer, A., Ziarek, L., Jayaram, K.R., Eugster, P. (2012). Abstracting Context in Event-Based Software. In: Leavens, G.T., Chiba, S., Haupt, M., Ostermann, K., Wohlstadter, E. (eds) Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development IX. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7271. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35551-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35551-6_4

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