Abstract
The original vision of ubiquitous computing [14] is about en- abling people to more easily accomplish tasks through the seamless in- terworking of the physical environment and a computing infrastructure. A major challenge to the practical realization of this vision involves the integration of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software components: consider the awkwardness of such a mundane task as ex- porting a textual memo written on a Palm Pilot to a Microsoft Word document. It is not enough to overcome the protocol and data format mismatches that currently impede the interoperation of these entities: for the user experience to be truly seamless, we must provide a framework for the dynamic connection of such endpoints on demand, to support the ad-hoc interactions that are an integral part of ubiquitous compu- ting. To this end, we offer a dynamic mediation framework called Paths. A Path consists of dynamically instantiated, automatically composable operators that bridge datatype and protocol mismatches between com- ponents wishing to communicate. Because operator composability is in- ferred from the type system, adding support for a new type of endpoint requires only incremental work; because the control and data flow for Pa- ths are largely decoupled from the communicating endpoints, it is easy to connect COTS or legacy components. We describe the Paths archi- tecture, our prototype implementation, and our experience and lessons based on several production applications built with the framework, and outline some continuing work on Paths in the context of the Stanford Interactive Workspaces project.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Clark, D., and Tennenhouse, D. Architectural Considerations for a New Generation of Protocols. Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM’ 90, Sept.1990, pp.201–208.
Armando Fox, Steven D. Gribble, Yatin Chawathe, Eric A. Brewer.Adapting to Network and Client Variation Using Active Proxies: Lessons and Perspectives. IEEE Personal Communications (invited submission), Aug 1998. Special issue on adapting to network and client variability.
David Garlan, Robert Allen, and John Ockerbloom. Architectural Mismatch, or, Why it’s hard to build systems out of existing parts. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Software Engineering, April 1995.
Steve Gribble, Matt Welsh, Eric A. Brewer, and David Culler.The MultiSpace: an Evolutionary Platform for Infrastructural Services. In Second USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (USITS’ 99), Aug 1999.
Andrew C. Huang, Benjamin C. Ling, John Barton, and Armando Fox.Running the Web Backwards: Appliance Data Services. WWW-9, Amsterdam, May 2000.
John Ockerbloom. Mediating Among Diverse Data Formats. PhD Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, Jan 1998.
Daniel Salber, Anind K. Dey and Gregory D. Abowd.The Context Toolkit: Aiding the Development of Context-Enabled Applications. In the Proceedings of the 1999 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’ 99), Pittsburgh, PA, May 15-20, 1999. pp. 434–441.
M. Shaw, R. DeLine, V. Klein, T.L. Ross, D.M. Young, G. Zelesnik.Abstractions for Software Architecture and Tools to Support Them. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 21, No 4, April 95.
Mike Spreitzer and Andrew Begel. More Flexible Data Types. In Proceedings of The Eighth IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, June 1999.
Stanford Interactive Workspaces Project. http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/iwork/
Sun Microsystems. Jini Connection Technology Overview. whitepaper. http://www.sun.com/jini/overview/overview.ps
Helen J. Wang, Bhaskaran Raman, et al.ICEBER G: An Internet-core Network Architecture for Integrated Communications. Submitted to IEEE Personal Communications.
J.A. Watlington and V.M. Bove, Jr.Stream-Based Computing and Future Television.Proc. 137th SMPTE Technical Conference, pp.69–79, 1995.
Mark Weiser. The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American, 265(3):94–104, September 1991
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kiciman, E., Fox, A. (2000). Using Dynamic Mediation to Integrate COTS Entities in a Ubiquitous Computing Environment. In: Thomas, P., Gellersen, HW. (eds) Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing. HUC 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1927. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-39959-3_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-39959-3_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-41093-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39959-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive