PerCraft: Towards Live Deployment of Pervasive Applications

Abstract

Pervasive applications are typically realized through ad-hoc service and user interface compositions. While many tools focus on the development of pervasive services by masking the complex technical side of a pervasive computing environment, the deployment of an application as a whole -- i.e. a set of services and user interfaces -- is often forgotten. We present an alternative design strategy and tool for pervasive applications in which pervasiveness is not considered a handicap, but rather as a situation that draws extra attention to the deployment of applications. By crafting pervasive applications and their services as independent context consumers and producers, we illustrate how the behaviour of a pervasive application deployed using our approach can be observed while it executes.