FU Berlin, Fachbereich Mathematik und Informatik, Institut für Informatik
A leading trend in software development predicts that applications of
the future will be created from building blocks, such as components and
Web services. This is accompanied with the complementary trends of continuous
network connectivity and ubiquitous computing. The confluence of these,
results in a proliferation of building blocks available from a multitude
of sources all vying for inclusion into end-user applications. To deal
with this situation, building block selection and integration must be simplified.
One approach, is to make applications "context-aware", meaning that their
design and functionality can change dynamically to suit the current usage
context. In this approach, the context is used as a filter to determine
whether building blocks are
candidates for potential integration with and/or removal from the application
at any given time. For example, the current task or the locality of the
user should dynamically determine the available set of building blocks.
Typical component frameworks have difficulty dealing with such an approach
since they require early decisions about building block selection and integration.
Instead, these decisions should be deferred until as late as possible.
To attain this, a framework that explicitly supports deferred integration
through dynamic selection is needed. The Gravity project is an attempt
to provide such a solution; Gravity is an application framework, built
on top of the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) framework, that explicitly
supports
applications whose building blocks are highly dynamic in nature. The
ultimate goal of the project is to build applications that are context-aware.
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