Diss. ETH No. 19410 A Collection-Oriented Application Framework

Mobile devices have gone through a dramatic evolution since the introduction of mo-bile phones. The increase of computational and storage capacities together with the additional sensory and interaction facilities have turned a special-purpose device ded-icated to making and receiving phone calls into a general-purpose computing platform. The latest generation of mobile devices are capable of hosting a wide range of ap-plications. A new class of mobile applications was established, which integrate the notion of location, support for opportunistic information creation and sharing, and so-cial context-awareness. The emergence of online application stores and the number of available applications reflects their popularity among end users as well as developers. Growing developer communities driven by the availability of platforms for application development have produced a vast number and variety of mobile applications. However, existing programming platforms for mobile devices do not tap the full potential of application development support. The application programming interfaces (APIs) they offer may achieve efficiency and flexibility, but their lack of abstraction un