AmbientJS: A Mobile Cross-Platform Actor Library for Multi-Networked Mobile Applications

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that due to technological advances programmers today are faced with a ninth fallacy of distributed computing: “there is only one fixed application architecture throughout the lifetime of the application”. Mobile devices are nowadays equipped with wireless technology which allows them to interact with one another in both a peer-to-peer way (e.g. Wi-Fi-direct, bluetooth, etc.), and via a server in the cloud. Distributed software engineering abstractions, however, do not aid the programmer in developing mobile applications which communicate over multiple networking technologies. This paper introduces AmbientJS, a mobile cross-platform actor library which incorporates a novel type of remote reference, called network transparent references (NTRs), which allows to seamlessly combine multiple application architectures. We give an overview of the NTR model, detail their implementation in a novel actor library called AmbientJS and assess the performance of AmbientJS with benchmarks.