MOBICHARTS: A notation to specify mobile computing applications

Abstract

A standard notation, that unambiguously expresses different aspects of a system, is important to the process of software development. The expressiveness of a standard notation helps analysts and developers to describe a computing scenario or to formulate software architecture and then to communicate these decisions unambiguously to other team members. Much attention is already given to the software development methodologies and architectural descriptions. Specifically, statecharts and state transition diagrams have been used to show the state space of a system, the events that cause state transitions and the actions that result from a state change. The paradigm shift to object-oriented programming has changed the method of system analysis and design from traditional top-down approach to bottom-up object-oriented approach. This change in approach has motivated the development of objectcharts that depict the behaviour of objects used in a system. This paper extends the notational capabilities of objectcharts to specify the issues related to the mobile computing. We discuss the specialty and the limitations found in mobile computing to motivate the readers on the necessity of having methods for developing mobile computing applications. We have shown that while making use of all the niceties of Statecharts as well as objectcharts, the formalism can be extended for developing mobile computing applications. First, we discuss the need for an extension of objectchart notation by showing the limitations of objectcharts in specifying mobile computing applications. Second, we propose an extension to objectcharts, referred to as Mobicharts. The proposed Mobicharts can specify the important characteristics of mobile computing applications. We illustrate typical mobile computing characteristics such as migration, hoarding, cloning, synchronization, sharing and disconnected operations using Mobicharts.