Support for M-Commerce Software Autonomy

Recently there has been a flurry of research inspired by social and biological models for achieving software autonomy. This has been prompted by the need to automate laborious administration tasks, recover from unanticipated systems failure, and provide self-protection from security vulnerabilities, whilst guaranteeing predictable autonomic software behaviour. However, runtime assured adaptation of software to new requirement in a mobile setting, where there is code mobility in the form of mobile agents as well as the presence of mobile devices, is still a major outstanding issue for research. This paper presents a language support for the programming of autonomic software in mobile environments and m-commerce environments in particular. The paper starts by a review of the state-of-the-art into runtime software adaptation and mobility. This is followed by a developed Neptune framework and language support applied to mobile ambients, which is here described via an illustrative example based on a commercial decision support system that automatically updates according to a newly developed run time code editor. The paper ends with a discussion and some concluding remarks leading to suggested further works.