Developing complex data-centric applications, which manage intricate interactions between distributed and heterogeneous entities from pervasive environments, is a tedious task. In this paper we pursue the difficult objective of assessing the ”easiness” of data-centric development in pervasive environments, which turns out to be much more challenging than simply measuring execution times in performance analyses and requires highly qualified programmers.We introduce P-Bench, a benchmark that comparatively evaluates the easiness of development using three types of systems: (1) the Microsoft StreamInsight unmodified Data Stream Management System, LINQ and C#, (2) the StreamInsight++ ad hoc framework, an enriched version of StreamInsight, that meets pervasive application requirements, and (3) our SoCQ system, designed for managing data, streams and services in a unified manner. We define five tasks that we implement in the analysed systems, based on core needs for pervasive application development. To evaluate the tasks’ implementations, we introduce a set of metrics and provide the experimental results. Our study allows differentiating between the proposed types of systems based on their strengths and weaknesses when building pervasive applications.