A Middleware-Based Application Framework for Active Space Applications

iii Ubiquitous computing lays the foundation for a future where people’s living and working spaces are interactive and programmable. Users interact with their offices, homes, cars, malls and airports to request information, benefit from the resources available, and configure the habitat’s behavior. Data and tasks are always accessible and are mapped dynamically to convenient resources present in the current location. Users may extend the habitat with personal devices that seamlessly integrate with the environment. Such user-oriented interactive environments may require a novel software infrastructure to operate their resources, sense context properties, and assist in the development and execution of applications. I present in this thesis an application framework and the supporting infrastructure to assist in the development of user-centric, resource-aware, context-sensitive, multi-device and mobile applications. The framework consists of a distributed component-based infrastructure, a mechanism to define applications once and adapt them to different environments automatically, and a configurable management interface. i