REME-D: a reflective epidemic message-oriented debugger for ambient-oriented applications

Debuggers are an integral part, albeit often neglected, of the development of distributed applications. Ambient-oriented programming (AmOP) is a distributed paradigm for applications running on mobile ad hoc networks. In AmOP the complexity of programming in a distributed setting is married with the network fragility and open topology of mobile applications. To our knowledge, there is no comprehensive debugging approach that tackles both these issues. In this paper we present REME-D, an online debugger that integrates techniques from distributed debugging (event-based debugging, message breakpoints) and proposes facilities to deal with ad hoc, fragile networks -- epidemic debugging, and support for frequent disconnections. A prototype for REME-D is implemented for the AmbientTalk language using the meta-actor protocol provided by AmbientTalk to implement its features.

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