research-article

Persistent contextual values as inter-process layers

Author:

Markus RaabAuthors Info & Claims

Mobile! 2016: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Mobile Development

Pages 9 - 16

https://doi.org/10.1145/3001854.3001855

Published: 21 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Mobile applications today often fail to be context aware when they also need to be customizable and efficient at run-time. Context-oriented programming allows programmers to develop applications that are more context aware. Its central construct, the so-called layer, however, is not customizable. We propose to use novel persistent contextual values for mobile development. Persistent contextual values automatically adapt their value to the context. Furthermore they provide access without overhead. Key-value configuration files contain the specification of contextual values and the persisted contextual values themselves. By modifying the configuration files, the contextual values can easily be customized for every context. From the specification, we generate code to simplify development. Our implementation, called Elektra, permits development in several languages including C++ and Java. In a benchmark we compare layer activations between threads and between applications. In a case study involving a web-server on a mobile embedded device the performance overhead is minimal, even with many context switches.

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Cited By

Raab MBarany G(2017)Challenges in Validating FLOSS ConfigurationOpen Source Systems: Towards Robust Practices10.1007/978-3-319-57735-7_11(101-114)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57735-7_11
Raab M(2016)Elektra: universal framework to access configuration parametersThe Journal of Open Source Software10.21105/joss.000441:8(44)Online publication date: Dec-2016
https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00044

Index Terms

Persistent contextual values as inter-process layers
1. Information systems
  1. Data management systems
    1. Query languages
2. Theory of computation
  1. Theory and algorithms for application domains
    1. Database theory
      1. Database query languages (principles)

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cover image ACM Conferences

Mobile! 2016: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Mobile Development

October 2016

44 pages

ISBN:9781450346436

DOI:10.1145/3001854

General Chairs:
Lori Flynn,
Alberto Sillitti

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 21 October 2016

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Cited By

Raab MBarany G(2017)Challenges in Validating FLOSS ConfigurationOpen Source Systems: Towards Robust Practices10.1007/978-3-319-57735-7_11(101-114)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57735-7_11
Raab M(2016)Elektra: universal framework to access configuration parametersThe Journal of Open Source Software10.21105/joss.000441:8(44)Online publication date: Dec-2016
https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00044

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