BraceForce: A Middleware to Enable Sensing Integration in Mobile Applications for Novice Programmers Xi Zheng, Dewayne E. Perry, Christine Julien The Center for Advanced Research in Software Engineering Mobile and Pervasive Computing Lab The University of Texas at Austin
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[email protected] ABSTRACT demonstrating the feasibility of applications, the develop- Even as the use of sensor networks to support mobile ap- ment of support services such as routing protocols or energy- plications grows, our ability to seamlessly and efficiently in- saving algorithms, or on advancement of hardware platforms corporate sensor network capabilities into our mobile ap- and operating systems. Little focus has been applied to ef- plications remains astoundingly difficult. Today, accessing fective development support for applications that integrate remote sensing data and integrating this data into the adap- the capabilities of networked sensing platforms in easy to use tive behavior of a dynamic user-facing mobile application re- and extensible ways. In addition to the variety of data for- quires interacting with multiple platforms, languages, data mats, communication technologies, and programming plat- formats, and communication paradigms. We present Brace- forms a developer must tackle, mobile applications also re- Force, an open and extensible middleware that allows de- quire handling network dynamics and energy constraints. velopers to access the myriad remote sensing capabilities This paper introduces BraceForce, a middleware for mo- inherent to today's mobile computing spaces (where mo- bile application development that simplifies the development, bile devices and sensors are closely integrated) using very deployment, and debugging of mobile applications.