Ubiscript: A Script Language for Ubiquitous Environment

Abstract

Many distributed and heterogeneous services and devices are accessible in ubiquitous computing environment, so interoperating those services and devices is one of the key tasks in implementing ubiquitous applications. We used to use script languages in integrating such interoperating components and services. However currently available most script languages are not suitable for ubiquitous environment because there are so diverse forms of interoperation targets such as service objects, web, legacy objects and programmable devices. So it is worthwhile designing a new script language well-suited to ubiquitous environment. In this paper, we propose a new script language, called Ubiscript, for the ubiquitous environment. We develop and adopt several unique language features such as remote scope, multiple contexts, web and legacy objects, remote exception handling, etc. in Ubiscript to overcome the limitations of conventional script languages. In this paper, we also describe the implementation of Ubiscript and its runtime system. A couple of ubiquitous applications were developed in Ubiscript, and the applications are tested on the runtime system. According to our experiences and evaluation, Ubiscript turned out to have a high potential in its expression power and contribution to improving ubiquitous application developers’ productivity.