The Implementation of a Distributed Framework to support ‘Follow Me’ Applications
Pete Steggles, Paul Webster, Andy Harter · 1998
Follow me applications support user mobility by adapting their behaviour to follow a user as he moves around a building. In order to adapt sensibly to their current environment, such applications need to know about the location and status of people and computing resources. This information needs to be readily accessible and must be up-to-date and accurate. As such a system involves human interaction, this presents some real-time constraints. This paper describes a framework for supporting such applications. It is based around a 3-tier architecture comprising a centralised database, a middle layer of parallel servers and a collection of distributed clients. Some clients gather information from the environment, and are long running. Other clients are mobile applications, which must respond rapidly to environmental changes. As all these applications are in daily use, robustness and availability are key additional requirements. The framework uses on-demand loading of CORBA objects and is s...