ReMMoC: A Reflective Middleware to Support Mobile Client Interoperability

Abstract

Mobile client applications must discover and interoperate with application services available to them at their present location. However, these services will be developed upon a range of middleware types (e.g. RMI and publish-subscribe) and advertised using different service discovery protocols (e.g. UPnP and SLP) unknown to the application developer. Therefore, a middleware platform supporting mobile client applications should ideally adapt its behaviour to interoperate with any type of discovered service. Furthermore, these applications should be developed independently from particular middleware implementations, as the interaction type is unknown until run-time. This paper presents ReMMoC, a reflective middleware platform that dynamically adapts both its binding and discovery protocol to allow interoperation with heterogeneous services. Furthermore, we present the ReMMoC programming model, which is based upon the Web Services concept of abstract services. We evaluate this work in terms of supporting mobile application development and the memory footprint cost of utilising reflection to create a mobile middleware platform.