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An Object-Oriented Approach for Context-Aware Applications

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Advances in Smalltalk (ISC 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 4406))

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Abstract

In this paper we present a novel, object-oriented approach for designing and building applications that provide context-aware services. Our approach emphasizes a clear separation of the relevant concerns in the application (base behavior, context-sensitive properties, services, sensing technologies, etc.) to improve modularity and thus simplify evolution. We first motivate the problem with a simple scenario of a virtual campus; we next present a new context model, which emphasizes on behavior instead of data. We next show the main components of our architecture and a simple approach to achieve a clear separation of concerns. We analyze the most important (sub) models in which we decompose a context-aware application and explain the use of dependency mechanisms to achieve loosely coupled relationships between objects. We also show how to take advantage of a reflective environment like Smalltalk to adapt the application’s behavior dynamically and to provide transparent object distribution. We finally compare our work with others and discuss some further work we are pursuing.

This paper has been partially supported by the SeCyT under the project PICT 13623.

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Wolfgang De Meuter

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Fortier, A., Cañibano, N., Grigera, J., Rossi, G., Gordillo, S. (2007). An Object-Oriented Approach for Context-Aware Applications. In: De Meuter, W. (eds) Advances in Smalltalk. ISC 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4406. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71836-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71836-9_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-71835-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-71836-9

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