Programming language support to context-aware adaptation: a case-study with Erlang

Software applications are increasingly situated in a world where context changes continuously. At the same time, applications need to provide continuous service, and the service provided often needs to change in order to adapt to the new contexts. Context-aware adaptation can be greatly facilitated by using programming languages that natively support high-level features to deal with contexts, context changes, and context-aware behaviors. Although context-oriented programming has been around for a while, most existing efforts focus on incorporating context-oriented features in languages that are not primarily oriented to concurrency, distribution, and dynamic reconfiguration. These features, however, characterize most pervasive context-aware situations. In this work, we illustrate how context-aware programming primitives may introduced in the parallel and distributed Erlang programming language. We also present an extended example, which illustrates the benefits of using our extension (ContextErlang) to design context-aware pervasive applications.