Network-aware references for pervasive social applications

In recent years, mobile devices such as smartphones have become more powerful, gaining the ability to communicate using multiple networking technologies. This evolution has given rise to pervasive social applications that enable social networking on the move. Currently, it is hard to take advantage of the available networking technologies because communication has to be managed separately for each technology. This forces programmers to manually keep track of the connectivity state and duplicate communication code per connection. This paper presents network-aware references, a distributed object-oriented programming abstraction that combines multi-networking and network awareness. They abstract over the implementation details of the different networking technologies while allowing programmers to react to changes in the connectivity of different networks around them.