WComp
WComp is a prototyping and dynamic execution environment for Ambient Intelligence applications. WComp is created by the Rainbow research team of the I3S laboratory, hosted by University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis and CNRS. It is an implementation of the Service Lightweight Component Architecture SLCA model. SLCA uses lightweight components to manage dynamic orchestrations of Web service for device, like UPnP or DPWS services, discovered in the software infrastructure.
Architecture
The WComp Architecture is organised around what we call Containers and Designers:
- The purpose of the Containers is to provide non-functional services required by Components of an assembly during runtime: instantiation, destruction of software components and connectors.
- The purpose of the Designers is to manipulate and adapt assemblies executed by containers. Several types of designers exist, the two main being:
- A graphical designer such as the SharpWComp SharpDevelop's AddIn enables to manually compose assembly of components according to a graphical representation of the event flow. It is particularly adapted to the description of the application.
- A designer based on Aspects of Assembly (AA) allows to describe compositional adaptation to reactively adapt the applications when the set of discovered services changes. According to contexts and available devices, different aspects can be selected, applied and then woven to adapt the application. They allow adapting dynamically the application to its context.
Platform
WComp.NET is available on several platforms.
The SharpDevelop Addin (SharpWComp) is only available on Windows using .NET 3.5, but the WComp Container Console (without graphical designer) is also available on GNU/Linux and Mac OS X with the help of Mono (version >= 2.4.6).
WComp.NET is also available and usable on embedded platforms with ARM processor:
- NSLU2 (XScale-IXP42x - Architecture ARMv5TE)
- Phidget 1072 (ARM920T - Famille ARM9 - Architecture ARMv4)
- Phidget 1073 (ARM926EJ-S - Famille ARM9E - Architecture ARMv5)
- Raspberry Pi rev B 512MB (ARM1176JZF-S - Famille ARM11 - Architecture ARMv6)
A release for Android is now available with the help of MonoDroid.
Illustrations
WComp.NET is designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications. WComp.NET is developed by Rainbow research team of Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis (Laboratoire I3S, UNS / CNRS). A growing family of tools are available now to help you to build Ambient Intelligence applications.