Architecture-centric programming for adaptive systems

Ubiquitous computing services are a fast-growing and challenging class of self-healing systems that must adapt to constant failures and environmental changes. Writing robust ubiquitous computing code is difficult in current programming systems. The architecture, interfaces, and logic of the program are often obscured by infrastructure details, making the development and evolution of these systems difficult and error-prone.We are exploring whether implementation language support for software architecture can aid in the development and evolution of ubiquitous computing systems. One such approach, embodied in the ArchJava language, allows programmers to express the software architecture of an application within Java source code. In this paper, we propose an extension to ArchJava allowing programmers to define custom connectors. Custom connectors are useful in many different contexts; we show how they can be used to implement part of the PlantCare ubiquitous computing application in ArchJava.