Writing Internet of Things Applicatations with Task-Oriented Programming

TL;DR

This paper introduces mTask, a task-oriented programming language designed for IoT devices, enabling dynamic, device-agnostic task execution and simplified programming of complex, heterogeneous IoT systems.

Contribution

The paper presents mTask, a novel multi-backend TOP language for IoT that supports dynamic task compilation and execution on resource-constrained, heterogeneous devices.

Findings

Enables dynamic task tailoring at runtime.

Supports device-agnostic bytecode interpretation.

Integrates with iTask for comprehensive IoT application development.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing fast. In 2018, there was approximately one connected device per person on earth and the number has been growing ever since. The devices interact with the environment via different modalities at the same time using sensors and actuators making the programs parallel. Yet, writing this type of programs is difficult because the devices have little computation power and memory, the platforms are heterogeneous and the languages are low level. Task Oriented Programming (TOP) is a declarative programming language paradigm that is used to express coordination of work, collaboration of users and systems, the distribution of shared data and the human-computer interaction. The mTask language is a specialized, yet full-fledged, multi-backend TOP language for IoT devices. With the bytecode interpretation backend and the integration with iTask, tasks can be executed on the device dynamically. This means that -- according to the current state of affairs -- tasks can be tailor-made at run time, compiled to device-agnostic bytecode and shipped to the device for interpretation. Tasks sent to the device are fully integrated in iTask to allow every form of interaction with the tasks such as observation of the task value and interaction with Shared Data Sources (SDSs). The entire IoT application -- both server and devices -- are programmed in a single language, albeit using two embedded Domain Specific Languages (EDSLs).