Handling Exceptional Conditions in Mobile Collaborative Applications: An Exploratory Case Study

The incorporation of exception handling strategies in mobile collaborative applications bring several challenges to middleware designers due to their intrinsic characteristics of openness, context-awareness, lack of structuring, asynchrony, and increased unpredictability. Publish-subscribe middleware systems are often referred as one of the most common solutions to support the construction of mobile collaborative applications. However, there is no systematic study dedicated to investigate to what extent publish-subscribe mechanisms provide proper support for introducing exception handling strategies into such mobile systems. This paper presents a case study where we have analyzed: (i) the problems emerging from the incorporation of application-specific error handling in a prototype context-aware mobile system from the health care domain, and (ii) the feasibility of a typical publish-subscribe middleware system, called MoCA, to implement the features of an exception handling mechanism tailored to specific requirements of mobile collaborative applications. This paper also discusses the suitability of existing mechanisms recently proposed in the literature to address the identified shortcomings