Experimenting with language support for proximity in ambient-oriented programming

Abstract

Proximity is a key to scalable and meaningful interactions in distributed systems, both natural and artificial, and in particular in pervasive computing environments. However, proximity as such is a vague notion that can be considered both in a very factual manner (spatial distance) and in a very abstract and subjective manner (user affinity). We claim that an adequate system or programming language for ambient intelligence applications ought to support an open notion of proximity, making it possible to rely on different, possibly subjective, understandings of proximity, as well as their combinations. We explore how to extend the Ambient-Oriented Programming language AmbientTalk with language constructs that give programmers flexible control over subjective proximity definitions in both service advertising and discovery. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.