Software Architecture for Mobile Computing

One form of software architecture is a framework for systems that serve the needs of a specific domain. These frameworks must contain sufficient detail to not lose the interesting aspects of the environment, yet they must not expose so many details as to be overwhelming and force the developer to lose the big picture. As the environments we develop for become more complex, it becomes more necessary to compose these frameworks in order to manage the complexity. Mobility is precisely one such environment that is emerging as computing components shrink in size and become more portable. As these components change location in space, their connectivity to other components changes and thus their access to data changes. Some programs needs to be able to respond to this change in connectivity. Others are able to abstract it away, simply perceiving changes in connectivity as changes in data availability. In this paper, we overview a solution to managing the complexity of applications for the the mobile environment in the context of a middleware. First, we present a meta-model, or a framework for generating middleware for mobile environments. Second, we show how this meta-model has been instantiated in the Lime middleware and how it has been used to develop several mobile applications.