Software Engineering for Mobility: Reflecting on the Past, Peering into the Future

At the end of the second millennium, mobility was a hot research topic. Physical mobility of devices was becoming commonplace with the availability of cheap wireless cards, the first attempts to transform phones into personal do-it-all devices were beginning to appear, and mobile ad hoc networks were attracting a huge interest from many research communities. Logical mobility of code was still going strong as a design option for distributed systems, with the Java language providing some of the ready-to-use building blocks. In 2000, when we put forth a research "roadmap" for software engineering for mobility, the challenges posed by this dynamic scenario were many. A decade and a half later, many things have changed. Mobility is no longer exotic: we juggle multiple personal devices every day while on the move, plus we grab and update applications on a whim from virtual stores. Indeed, some trends and visions we considered in our original paper materialized, while others faded, disappeare...