A generative programming approach to developing pervasive computing systems

Developing pervasive computing applications is a difficult task be- cause it requires to deal with a wide range of issues: heterogeneous devices, entity distribution, entity coordination, low-level hardware knowledge. . . Besides requiring various areas of expertise, pro- gramming such applications involves writing a lot of administra- tive code to glue technologies together and to interface with both hardware and software components. This paper proposes a generative programming approach to providing programming, execution and simulation support dedi- cated to the pervasive computing domain. This approach relies on a domain-specific language, named DiaSpec, dedicated to the de- scription of pervasive computing systems. Our generative approach factors out features of distributed systems technologies, making DiaSpec-specified software systems portable. The DiaSpec compiler is implemented and has been used to generate dedicated programming frameworks for a variety of per- vasive computing applications, including detailed ones to manage the building of an engineering school.