The long-term goal for research within object-technology is to develop new results within software technology for pervasive computing systems in the four areas mentioned above. The strategy of the research is application inspired and the purpose of the first projects such as Objects in Appliances has been to discover needs for long-term projects. Since the center is still in its first year, subjects of that nature have not yet been identified. A number of activities with a long-term perspective have however been initiated. These include

1. Analysis of state-of-art for architecture of pervasive computing systems.
During spring 2001, this activity has been centered around a research seminar on architecture of pervasive computing systems. This seminar has included a systematic study of central areas within software architecture seen from a pervasive computing context. This has included analysis of traditional areas within software architecture (like CORBA) and their applicability to pervasive computing, over mobile agents and new technologies such as Jini, .NET and pervasive computing products from e.g. IBM.

2. During spring 2001, Lars Bak, Sun, has given a graduate course in virtual machines for OO languages at DAIMI. The purpose has been to build up expertise in virtual machines and to initiate student projects. The course has been a great success and has resulted in a number of projects. In addition to students, people from member companies of Alexandra have participated.

3. A Master Thesis project on the architecture of pervasive computing systems has been completed. The focus has been to investigate to what extent Java applications can be migrated between heterogeneous computing environments. The rationale for this activity has been that a possible future pervasive computing architecture may be based on applications following the user and available wherever needed. A user working on a session/application may want to move the session/application to another terminal. A concrete experiment on migration of a Java application from a PalmPilot to a PC has been carried out.

4. A number of Thesis projects are currently being carried out. These include development of a debugger for (distributed) Jini applications and development of an application framework that can support a wide variety of terminals.

5. A group of students is currently developing a general virtual machine with support for pervasive computing. The VM is expected to support Java as well as BETA. This project is being supervised by Lars Bak, Sun.

6. Experiments with application migration between wireless units like IPAQ’s and laptops are being planned.

7. Cooperation with Microsoft regarding porting BETA to .NET is currently being negotiated with Microsoft.

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