Language Engineering for Mobile Software

Mobile systems offer the possibility of delivering software services that tightly match user needs,thanks to their availability right at the moment and place where they are needed, and their ability to take advantage of local resources and self-adapt to their environment of use. Alas, writing software for mobile systems is not an easy endeavour. Mobile software construction imposes a number challenges that render existing programming technology insufficient to write such software conveniently. To improve this situation, we have taken a language engineering approach. In this chapter we identify the main challenges encountered in mobile software construction and the requirements they rise in the design of programming languages. By way of illustration, we present the result of our language engineering experiments —four programming models to ease the construction of software that can cope gracefully with the challenges brought about by mobility.

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