Autonomic pervasive applications driven by abstract specifications

Pervasive application architectures present stringent requirements that make their development especially hard. In particular, they need to be flexible in order to cope with dynamism in different forms (e.g. service and data providers and consumers). The current trend to build applications out of remote services makes the availability of constituent application components inherently dynamic. Developers can no longer assume that applications are static after development or at run time. Unfortunately, developing applications that are able to cope with dynamism is very complex. Existing development approaches do not provide explicit support for managing dynamism. In this paper we describe Rondo, a tool suite for designing pervasive applications. More specifically, we present our propositions in pervasive application specification, which borrows concepts from service-oriented component assembly, model-driven engineering (MDE) and continuous deployment, resulting in a more flexible approach than traditional application definitions. Then the capabilities of our application model are demonstrated with an example application scenario designed using our approach.