The combination of mobile and embedded computing devices holds potential for a novel landscape of application and services in the direct surrounding of the user. The realization of such a landscape requires solutions to cope with the volatile nature of the environment composition, the absence of central management infrastructure, and the heterogeneity of resources. To unburden developers of application services from searching these solutions themselves, we started developing a generic software framework called SmartWare. SmartWare is a collection of principles and tools that are intended to simplify and accelerate the development of application services at the edge of the Internet and beyond. In this paper we describe the features of SmartWare, a prototype implementation and a test application we realized with the framework prototype.