COPAL-ML: a macro language for rapid development of context-aware applications in wireless sensor networks

Application development on wireless sensor networks is becoming more and more challenging due to increasing complexity of applications and lack of dedicated programming models. Developers should concentrate on the application logic, while network designers should ensure the network and sensor performance. However, in reality, these two roles often overlap because the architectural and programming abstraction between the network and application is missing. Research on middleware and language that bridges these two abstraction levels is still in a preliminary stage. This paper proposes a macro language based on our previous work COPAL (COntext Provisioning for ALl). COPAL is a runtime context provisioning middleware that, via a loosely-coupled and composable architecture, ensures context information from wireless sensor networks and other sources can be processed for the needs of context-aware applications. COPAL-ML is a macro language that extends Java programming language and is tailored for the application development using COPAL. Its main task is to reduce development efforts, hide the inherent complexity of COPAL API, and separate concerns of the context-aware application from underlining wireless sensor network.