Abstract: Activity-oriented context-aware (AOCA) applications are representative in pervasive computing. These applications recognize daily-life human activities, perceive the environment status related to the activities, and react to ensure the smooth performance of the activities. Existing research proposed a specific light-weight, incremental method to support the development of such applications; however it is not easy to learn and use. This paper aims to facilitate the development of such applications and improve the productivity of developers. We propose AocML, a textual domain-specific language which provides a high-level abstraction of AOCA applications. Specifically, we first show the software model of AOCA applications and the abstract syntax of AocML. Then, we introduce the concrete syntax of AocML. We also implement the tools for AocML, including the development environment as well as the generation of Java code and ontology specification. Moreover, we use a case study and evaluation to demonstrate the advantages of AocML.