Highly dynamic behaviour adaptability through prototypes with subjective multimethods

ABSTRACT

With the advent of ambient intelligence and advances in mobile hardware technology, the next generation of software systems will require the ability to gracefully and dynamically adapt to changes in their surrounding environment. Contemporary languages provide no dedicated support to this end, thus requiring software developers to achieve this run-time adaptability through the use of specific design patterns and architectural solutions. As a consequence, all possible variability points of mobile systems need to be anticipated up front. Instead, we aim at solving the problem at the language level. We propose a new programming language called Ambience that provides dedicated language mechanisms to manage changing contexts and deal with run-time adaptation of mobile applications to those contexts. The language abstractions we propose are based on a prototype-based programming model that features multimethods and subjective object behaviour. We illustrate and motivate our approach by means of two running examples that were implemented in our language.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features

General Terms:
Design, Languages

Keywords:
ambient intelligence, context-oriented programming, multiple dispatch, prototype-based programming, subjective dispatch