Engineering Future Internet applications: The Prime approach

•We define a new architectural style called P-REST as refinement of the REST one.•We provide a modeling framework allowing for the design of P-RESTful applications.•We provide the PRIME approach supporting the development of P-RESTful applications.•We provide a quantitative analysis to assess the PRIME efficiency.•We provide a qualitative analysis to assess the PRIME efficacy.

The Future Internet is envisioned as a worldwide environment connecting a large open-ended collection of heterogeneous and autonomous resources, namely Things, Services and Contents, which interact with each other anywhere and anytime. Applications will possibly emerge dynamically as opportunistic aggregation of resources available at a given time, and will be able to self-adapt according to the environment dynamics. In this context, engineers should be provided with proper modeling and programming abstractions to develop applications able to benefit from Future Internet, by being at the same time fluid, as well as dependable. Indeed, such abstractions should (i) facilitate the development of autonomous and independent interacting resources (loose coupling), (ii) deal with the run-time variability of the application in terms of involved resources (flexibility), (iii) provide mechanisms for run-time resources discovery and access (dynamism), and (iv) enable the running application to accommodate unforeseen resources (serendipity).To this end, Prime (P-Rest at design/run tIME) defines the P-REST architectural style, and a set of P-REST oriented modeling and programming abstractions to provide engineers with both design-time and run-time support for specifying, implementing and operating P-RESTful applications.