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Georgia Institute of Technology > College of Computing > Groups > GVU > FCE > PIE Group

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Current Projects:

DIAMOND

Opportunistic Annexing

SEREFE

Translucent Computing

Previous Projects:

Supporting Routine Decision-Making

Mobile Sensing

Cepher

DynEx M/F

Dynamically Extensible Module Framework

Students: Ken Edwards, Jason Fulghum, Joaquin Madruga, Tom Park

The goal of this project was to make use of a personal digital assistant (PDA) as an additional input and output resource when connected to a desktop computer. Our inspiration was the observation that many users leave their PDA docked in the cradle while working on their desktop machine, which presents an opportunity to draw on the PDA as an additional resource. We wanted to be able to quickly prototype applications to explore how to make the best use of the PDA as an I/O device, particularly for monitoring or controlling some aspect of the desktop computer.

We ended up creating DynEx M/F, a Dynamically Extensible Module Framework. As the name implies, it supports dynamically loadable modules that designers can write quickly. Modules are simply Java code describing the behavior that the Windows CE device should have. Modules have almost the full power of the Java language. Much of the code is executed on the desktop, then displayed on the PDA.

DynEx M/F is useful because:

  • New modules can be created extremely rapidly, simply by providing code for two methods.
  • No Windows CE programming experience is necessary.
  • It provides nearly full access to Java capabilities, such as Java's support for layout managers, networking, and database management.
  • Modules support on-the-fly customization by writing another Java class describing the options.
  • The framework provides everything: configuration data persistence, GUI, communication, marshalling data, and more.
  • It allows modules to be loaded and removed during run time.

We built three modules with the framework to demonstrate its capabilities:

  • RSS Newsfeed Module
  • Weather Forecast Module
  • x10 ?Firecracker? Controller Module