Client-server software infrastructure for context-aware applications development

Context-aware applications are widely used with mobile devices. The complexity of context-aware applications is still a challenge for context-aware application developers. The contextual information is difficult to manipulate. There are few conceptual programming models and implementation frameworks to help design context-aware applications. There are also few development environments to ease developing and testing context-aware applications. This thesis focuses on an effective approach to facilitating the context-aware application design and implementation. We define a multi-layer programming model. This programming model allows context-aware application designers to separate high-level application logic design from low-level raw context data handling to ease the development of context-aware applications. We provide an implementation framework based on the client/server software architecture. This implementation framework offers several pre-built components to complete the common tasks of context-aware applications. We also design a visual development environment to integrate and test user-defined application components with the implementation framework. The environment can automatically generate executable context-aware applications based on the user-defined specification documents.