Robert Adelmann

SPARK Rapid Prototyping Environment – Mobile Phone Development Made Easy

Over the past few years mobile phones have evolved into attractive platforms for novel types of applications. However, compared to the design and prototyping of desktop software, mobile phone development still requires programmers to have a high level of expertise in both phone architectures and their low-level programming languages. In this paper we analyze common difficulties in mobile phone programming and present SPARK, a publicly available rapid prototyping platform that allows programmers without prior mobile programming experience to create advanced mobile phone applications in a fast and easy way. SPARK currently supports Symbian S60 devices and enables developers to quickly design, test, upload, monitor, and update their applications. We also present the results of a case study, where 70+ students used SPARK to develop mobile applications as part of a graduate course on distributed systems.

IDEA: a framework for the fast creation of interactive animations by pen sketching

We present a Java-based framework for the easy and on-the-fly creation of algorithm animations. Animations are created by sketching both the objects that should be animated and operations that should be performed on them. The IDEA (Interactive Domain rEcognition and Animation) framework combines the recognition of drawn structures, the interaction with these structures and their animation in order to achieve an effortless and natural creation of animations. The framework itself supports the creation of animations in arbitrary domains through a dynamic plug-in architecture, where so-called domain modules encapsulate all domain-specific semantics. Its application and potential is outlined by the help of three prototypical domain modules for linear lists, Petri nets, and the game Connect-four.

JSense: prototyping sensor-based, location-aware applications in java

Creating applications based on data from individual sensor nodes is typically a two-tiered process: Firstly, a (potentially large) number of sensor nodes is deployed in order to gather comprehensive datasets. After analyzing the collected data, algorithms are then installed on the individual nodes and iteratively fine-tuned using a collect-and-analyze procedure. This approach is not only time consuming, but also prone to errors: the two separate steps of data collection and data analysis complicate algorithm development; the absence of programming abstractions in embedded systems programming languages often introduces hard-to-detect runtime errors; and the lack of modern integrated development environments (IDEs) does not allow for quick trial-and-error prototyping. To mitigate those effects, we have developed JSense – a hardware abstraction layer for modern sensor nodes that allows for Java-based access to all sensor and actuator controls. It supports an IDE-based centralized development cycle with real-time debugging of a particular sensor environment, as well as the use of not-yet-available sensor and actuator hardware on each node, such as positioning information. Using JSense, designers of sensor-based environments can quickly try out a combination of situations and observe in real-time the data collection processes of their nodes, while programmers are able to prototype applications in their favorite Java-IDE in a hardware independent fashion, even taking into account not-yet-deployed node hardware.