Developing Mobile Applications: A LIME Primer

Mobility poses peculiar challenges that must be addressed by novel programming constructs. LIME (Linda in a Mobile Environment) tackles the problem by adopting a coordination perspective inspired by work on the Linda model. The context for computation, represented in Linda by a single, globally accessible, persistent tuple space, is reinterpreted in LIME as the transient sharing of the tuple spaces carried by individual mobile units. Additional constructs provide increased expressiveness, by enabling programs to deal with the location of tuples and to react to specified states. The resulting model provides a minimalist set of abstractions that promise to facilitate rapid and dependable development of mobile applications. In this paper, we illustrate the model underlying LIME, present the programming interface of the companion middleware, and discuss how applications and higher-level middleware services can be built using it.