A Paradigm Shift in the Design of Mobile Applications

Mobility has emerged as an important new trend in the arena of distributed computing bringing along with it deep social and technical transformations. These changes clearly create an increasing demand for applications and middleware that exploit and support mobility. This paper surveys the main classes of paradigms and middlewares for distributed (mobile) systems and proposes a new paradigm inspired in the concept of magnetic fields from physics. The model is then formally defined and implementation issues concerning extensions to be applied to current middlewares in order to support the paradigm are detailed. Finally, conclusions are drawn and the main future works are listed.