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Runtime support for type-safe and context-based behavior adaptation

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Abstract

Context-awareness is becoming critical for mobile and ubiquitous computing, where the application needs dynamically adapt its behavior to its execution environment. Context-oriented programming (COP) languages support dynamic behavior adaptation, however, they do not support dynamic layer addition. As a result, they provide little support for the runtime adaptation of application behavior in case that unpredictable execution environments are encountered. Furthermore, block-structured constructs for layer activation hardly support fine-grain adaptation and separate changes of contexts and execution of context-specific methods with difficulty. In this paper, we propose a virtual machine (VM)-centric approach to address these issues. It incorporates object composition and delegation into the VM to implement layer activation, and extends existing VM services to support dynamic layer addition. To ensure that our approach preserves the type safety properties of the program, we develop a calculus built on featherweight Java (FJ) to describe the approach, focus on type-checking issues, and prove type soundness of the calculus. We also present the implementation and evaluation of our approach. The evaluation demonstrates that our approach has advantages over the compilerbased approach proposed by JCOP.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Changpeng Zhu, Yinliang Zhao, Bo Han, Qinghua Zeng & Ying Ma

Authors
  1. Changpeng Zhu
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  2. Yinliang Zhao
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  3. Bo Han
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  4. Qinghua Zeng
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  5. Ying Ma
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yinliang Zhao.

Additional information

Changpeng Zhu is a doctoral candidate at the School of Electronic and Information Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. His research interests focus on the Java virtual machine and type systems.

Yinliang Zhao is a professor of Computer Science at the School of Electronic and Information Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Xi’an Jiaotong University at 1995. His research interests focus on theory and implementation of programming languages, Granule-oriented programming, etc.

Bo Han is a doctoral candidate of Computer Science at the School of Electronic and Information Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. His research interests focus on in programming languages and applications.

Qinghua Zeng is a doctoral candidate at the School of Electronic and Information Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. Her research interests focus on the areas of compilers and optimization.

Ying Ma is studying for a MS of Computer Science at the School of Electronic and Information Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. Her research interests focus on speculative multithreading and compilers.

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Zhu, C., Zhao, Y., Han, B. et al. Runtime support for type-safe and context-based behavior adaptation. Front. Comput. Sci. 8, 17–32 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-013-2337-6

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