The rise of mobile computing platforms has given rise to a new class of applications: mobile applications that interact with peer applications running on neighbouring phones. Developing such applications is challenging because of problems inherent to concurrent and distributed programming, and because of problems inherent to mobile networks, such as the fact that wireless network connectivity is often intermittent, and the lack of centralized infrastructure to coordinate the peers.We present AmbientTalk, a distributed programming language designed specifically to develop mobile peer-to-peer applications. AmbientTalk aims to make it easy to develop mobile applications that are resilient to network failures by design. We describe the language's concurrency and distribution model in detail, as it lies at the heart of AmbientTalk's support for responsive, resilient application development. The model is based on communicating event loops, itself a descendant of the actor model. We contribute a small-step operational semantics for this model and use it to establish data race and deadlock freedom.

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Abstract. Mobile devices, such as smart phones, have become ubiquitous. This evolution has given rise to a vast ecosystem of mobile applications. Typically these applications only use a small subset of the networking technologies at their disposal. Building applications that use multiple networking technologies simultaneously or exploit knowledge about the available connections is a laborious task. Programmers must manually keep track of the connectivity state and duplicate communication code per connection type. This paper presents networkaware references, a distributed object-oriented programming abstraction that eases multi-networking for mobile applications and allows programmers to react to changes in the connectivity of different networks around them. We show how network-aware references are implemented and evaluate how well they switch between technologies.

SUMMARYOur everyday environments may soon be pervaded with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags integrated in physical objects. These RFID tags can store a digital representation of the physical object and transmit it wirelessly to pervasive, context‐aware applications running on mobile devices. However, communicating with RFID tags is prone to many failures inherent to the technology. This hinders the development of such applications, as traditional programming models require the programmer to deal with the RFID hardware characteristics manually. On the other hand, traditional RFID middleware focuses on limited scenarios in an enterprise context and not on general ubiquitous computing scenarios. In this paper, we extend the ambient‐oriented programming paradigm to program RFID applications, by considering RFID tags as intermittently connected mutable proxy objects hosted on mobile distributed computing devices, and detail our prototype implementation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract. In MANET applications, a common pattern is to maintain and query time-varying collections of remote objects. Traditional approaches require programmers to manually track the connectivity state of these remote objects and adding or removing them from local collections on a per-object basis. Queries over these collections have to be manually recomputed whenever the collection or its elements change.The code for maintaining these ad-hoc collections is scattered across the application code and leads to bugs hindering the application development process. In this paper, we propose an object-oriented abstraction called ambient clouds: a collection of objects whose contents are implicitly updated when changes occur. Ambient clouds can be queried and composed using reactive standard query operators. We show how ambient clouds ease the development of a collaborative peer-to-peer drawing application.