A Jini-Based Ubiquitous Messaging System Supporting Context Awareness and User Mobility

In ubiquitous environments, context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity such as a person or an object. Many sensors and small computers collect contexts and provide applications with them. Thus, ubiquitous applications need to represent contexts and exploit them effectively. In this paper, we design and implement a context-aware messaging system, called UMS (Ubiquitous Messaging System), based on Java and Jini. UMS can represent various contexts using XML scripts, and communicate text messages regardless of user's location using the proxy mechanism of Jini.