Event-Driven Mobile Computing with Objects

Abstract

We motivate why event-driven approaches are suitable to address the challenges of mobile and ubiquitous computing. In particular, we describe the beneficial properties of event-based communication in so-called mobile ad hoc networks. However, because contemporary programming languages feature no built-in support for event-driven programming, programmers are often forced to integrate event-driven concepts with a different programming paradigm. In particular, we study the difficulties in combining events with the object-oriented paradigm. We argue that these difficulties form the basis of what we call the objectevent impedance mismatch. We highlight the various issues at the software engineering level and propose to resolve this mismatch by introducing a novel object-oriented programming language that supports event-driven abstractions from the ground up.