Remote Debugging and Reflection in Resource Constrained Devices

Building software for devices that cannot locally support development tools can be challenging. These devices have either limited computing power to run an IDE (smart-phones), lack appropriate input/output interfaces (display, keyboard, mouse) for programming (mobile robots) or are simply unreachable for local development (cloud-servers). Yet remote debugging solutions can prove awkward to use due to their distributed nature. Empirical studies show us that on average 10.5 minutes per coding hour are spend for re-deploying applications. Moreover current solutions lack facilities that would otherwise be available in a local setting. In this dissertation in order to overcome these issues we first identify four desirable properties that an ideal solution for remote debugging should exhibit, namely: interactiveness, instrumentation, distribution and security. Given these properties we propose Mercury, a remote debugging model and architecture for reflective OO languages.