Active architecture for pervasive contextual services

International Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-hoc Computing MPAC 2003), ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2003), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil This work was supported by the FP5 Gloss project IST2000-26070, with partners at Trinity College Dublin and Université Joseph Fourier, and by EPSRC grants GR/M78403/GR/M76225, Supporting Internet Computation in Arbitrary Geographical Locations, and GR/R45154, Bulk Storage of XML Documents.Pervasive services may be defined as services that are available "to any client (anytime, anywhere)". Here we focus on the software and network infrastructure required to support pervasive contextual services operating over a wide area. One of the key requirements is a matching service capable of as-similating and filtering information from various sources and determining matches relevant to those services. We consider some of the challenges in engineering a globally distributed matching service that is scalable, manageable, and able to evolve incrementally as usage patterns, data formats, services, network topologies and deployment technologies change. We outline an approach based on the use of a peer-to-peer architecture to distribute user events and data, and to support the deployment and evolution of the infrastructure itself.Peer reviewe

Active architecture for pervasive contextual services

Pervasive services may be defined as services that are available to any client (anytime, anywhere). Here we focus on the software and network infrastructure required to support pervasive contextual services operating over a wide area. One of the key requirements is a matching service capable of assimilating and filtering information from various sources and determining matches relevant to those services. We consider some of the challenges in engineering a globally distributed matching service that is scalable, manageable, and able to evolve incrementally as usage patterns, data formats, services, network topologies and deployment technologies change. We outline an approach based on the use of a peer-to-peer architecture to distribute user events and data, and to support the deployment and evolution of the infrastructure itself

Performance of Data Transmission for mobile applications

Mobile applications have empowered and extended the usability of mobile devices far beyond merely supporting voice communication. The development of mobile applications, however, must deal with a variety of unique problems: limited working memory, limited storage, limited processing power, and small screen size. Mobile applications which rely on remote data sources and databases are particularly challenging given the need to transmit data through wireless media and often involve complex business logic. Our main goal is to improve the performance of mobile applications which rely on remote data sources and databases. In this research work, we compare different data transmission optimization techniques, different middleware approaches and identify combinations of approaches for improving performance of data transmission over wireless network. The results of this research provide useful guidelines for the development of mobile applications needing to connect to remote databases or data sources

Towards a mobile computing middleware: a synergy of reflection and mobile code techniques

The increasing popularity of wireless devices, such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants, watches and the like. is enabling new classes of applications that present challenging problems to designers. Applications have to be aware of, and adapt to, frequent variations in the context of execution, such as fluctuating network bandwidth, decreasing batten, power, changes in location or device capabilities, and so on. In this paper, we argue that middleware solutions for wired distributed systems cannot be used in a mobile setting, as the principle of transparency that has driven their design runs counter to the new degrees of awareness imposed by mobility: We propose a synergy of reflection and code mobility as a means for middleware to give applications the desired level of flexibility to react to changes happening in the environment, including those that have not necessarily been foreseen by middleware designers. We ruse the sharing and processing of images as an application scenario to highlight the advantages of our approach

A Framework For Transitioning Enterprise Web Services From XML-RPC to REST

Web Services are defined by the W3C as “a software system designed to support interoperable machine to machine interaction over a network . There are however, several alternatives as to how Web Services can be implemented: WS-* and Plain Old XML (POX) are popular approaches that markup their RPC (Remote Procedure Call) based payloads with eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Both approaches can use HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for transferring their messages. Representational State Transfer (REST) is an alternative approach that is gaining in popularity. This research-in-progress paper presents the issues of XML-RPC based Web Services (XML verbosity and message opacity) and why a RESTful approach solves these issues. We present results which show the improved performance. We present a framework that outlines a translation from XML-RPC to RESTful format for “read” style request messages. This framework is ideally suited to enable enterprises to gradually transition from XML-RPC to RESTful Web Services