A Framework for Programming Robust Context-Aware Applications

In this paper, we present a forward recovery model for programming robust context-aware applications. The mechanisms devised as part of this model fall into two categories: asynchronous event handling and synchronous exception handling. These mechanisms enable designing recovery actions to handle different kinds of failure conditions arising in context-aware applications. These include service discovery failures, service binding failures, exceptions raised by a service, and context invalidations. This model is integrated in the high-level programming framework that we have designed for building context-aware collaborative (CSCW) applications. In this paper, we demonstrate the capabilities of this model for programming various kinds of recovery patterns in context-aware applications.