Persistent Contextual Values as Inter-Process Layers

TL;DR

This paper introduces persistent contextual values for mobile apps, enabling automatic context adaptation and easy customization, with minimal performance overhead demonstrated through benchmarks and case studies.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach using persistent contextual values for context-aware mobile development, enhancing flexibility and efficiency over traditional context-oriented programming layers.

Findings

Minimal performance overhead in context switches

Effective customization via configuration files

Support for multiple programming languages

Abstract

Mobile applications today often fail to be context aware when they also need to be customizable and efficient at run-time. Context-oriented programming allows programmers to develop applications that are more context aware. Its central construct, the so-called layer, however, is not customizable. We propose to use novel persistent contextual values for mobile development. Persistent contextual values automatically adapt their value to the context. Furthermore they provide access without overhead. Key-value configuration files contain the specification of contextual values and the persisted contextual values themselves. By modifying the configuration files, the contextual values can easily be customized for every context. From the specification, we generate code to simplify development. Our implementation, called Elektra, permits development in several languages including C++ and Java. In a benchmark we compare layer activations between threads and between applications. In a case study involving a web-server on a mobile embedded device the performance overhead is minimal, even with many context switches.