A Middleware Architecture for Developing Mobile Applications

The Design Of Moca

It has been well recognized that the development of context-aware and adaptive mobile applications is a complex task and requires the careful observance of several well-known software engineering principles (Ghezzi, Jazayeri, & Mandrioli,1991; Roman, Picco, & Murphy, 2000). Some of these principles guided our design and development of the MoCA architecture itself and, therefore, were fundamental to the success of the project. As shown in Figure 1, MoCA was designed as a layered architecture following a context server approach (Baldauf, et al., 2007), in which largely independent services provide an infrastructure for collecting, distributing and processing context information. This approach aimed at facilitating the development of applications by observing principles such as separation of concerns, multi-level abstractions, incremental development, flexibility of customization and multi-language and interoperability support.

Figure 1.

Layered architecture of MoCA