Event-driven Mobile Computing with Objects

We motivate why event-driven approaches are suitable to address the challenges of mobile and ubiquitous computing. In particular, we describe the beneficial properties of event-based communication in so-called mobile ad hoc networks. However, because contemporary programming languages feature no built-in support for event-driven programming, programmers are often forced to integrate event-driven concepts with a different programming paradigm. In particular, we study the difficulties in combining events with the object-oriented paradigm. We argue that these difficulties form the basis of what we call the object-event impedance mismatch. We highlight the various issues at the software engineering level and propose to resolve this mismatch by introducing a novel object-oriented programming language that supports event-driven abstractions from the ground up.