A generative programming approach to developing pervasive computing systems

Abstract

Developing pervasive computing applications is a difficult task because it requires to deal with a wide range of issues: heterogeneous devices, entity distribution, entity coordination, low-level hardware knowledge ⋯ Besides requiring various areas of expertise, programming such applications involves writing a lot of administrative code to glue technologies together and to interface with both hardware and software components. This paper proposes a generative programming approach to providing programming, execution and simulation support dedicated to the pervasive computing domain. This approach relies on a domain-specific language, named DiaSpec, dedicated to the description of pervasive computing systems. Our generative approach factors out features of distributed systems technologies, making DiaSpec-specified software systems portable. The DiaSpec compiler is implemented and has been used to generate dedicated programming frameworks for a variety of pervasive computing applications, including detailed ones to manage the building of an engineering school. Copyright © 2009 ACM.