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Currently in Computer Magazine
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PrePrint: Cloud Computing in Developing Economies: Current State, Opportunities and Challenges
Global and local IT players, national governments and international agencies are paying significant attention to the cloud computing sector of developing economies. Regarding the potential and impact of cloud computing in the developing world, however, findings and conclusions drawn from surveys, studies and experiences of companies are confusing and remarkably inconsistent. In theory, it is possible for a developing world-based firm to have access to the same infrastructure and applications that the developed world has. However, there is little, if any, empirical evidence which shows how effectively these theories, ideas and speculations can translate into practice. In this paper, we examine the current state of and the opportunities afforded by cloud computing in developing economies. We also analyze barriers to taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by the cloud in these economies.
 
Cloud computing - Infrastructure - Business - E-Commerce - Business-to-Business
PrePrint: A Cross Analysis of Master Curricula in ICT and Professional Profiles
Abstract—Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) represent an emergent field in the new knowledge era with almost unlimited possibilities. However, the development of ICT industry in the near future will be mainly sustained by the teaching of ICT curricula in universities and higher education institutions. Theoretically, ICT curricula should be designed attending to the competences and professional profiles demanded by society and ICT companies, but the reality is that ICT curricula are not usually designed taking into account these premises. The purpose of this paper consists of illustrating the current state of ICT master curricula in the European Union (EU) through a cross analysis with professional profiles provided by the Career Space initiative. The obtained results will highlight the main strengths and weaknesses that the current ICT masters offer in the EU.
European Union - Education - Information and Communication Technologies - ICT - Government
PrePrint: Cloud Computing for Mobile Users
Cloud computing heralds a new era of computing where application services are provided through the Internet. Cloud computing can enhance the computing capability of mobile systems. Is cloud computing the ultimate solution for extending battery lifetimes of mobile systems?
Cloud computing - Business - Computing - E-Commerce - Business-to-Business
PrePrint: Use of the IEEE Codes of Conduct to Resolve Legal Disputes
We describe an important trend: increasing use by the US judicial system of CoCs to resolve disputes. Specifically, CoCs are being used to judge, literally, the performance of non-code subscribers and unaffiliated organizations. We illustrate successful use of an IEEE CoC at arbitration, resulting in a multi-million dollar judgment against an organization having no IEEE members. Our fictionalized 'case' is a compilation of real cases – an ERP system implementation failure. Plaintiffs faced a common dilemma: an inability to determine applicable ‘standards of care.’ These disputes were won as a direct result of using the IEEE CoC to compare and contrast human and organizational behaviors. Although the implications of this factual trend are unclear, use of such a technique has reached a 'tipping point.' We hope to spark discussion leading to more beneficial outcomes for the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE, our professional community, and for the information technology (IT), business and consulting communities.
Information technology - Enterprise resource planning - Organization - IEEE Computer Society - Technology
PrePrint: Model-based Runtime Verification of Web Service Interface Contracts
Web applications are required to follow an interface contract that specifies their expected behaviour when they communicate with a web service. Using the Amazon E-Commerce Service as an example, we show how we can automatically test an implementation for conformance as well as monitor at runtime that each partner fulfills its part of the contract.
Presented By:
Web service - Amazon.com - Programming - Service-Oriented Architecture - Business
Computer - September 2010 (Vol. 43, No. 9)
Computer
Sponsored Topics:
Conferences - Computer Science - Journal - Math - Publications
PrePrint: Scenario-Based Resource Prediction for QoS-Aware Media Processing
This paper advocates for annotating media streams with scenario information to reflect frame-level decode complexity. Scenarios are platform-independent and enable energy-efficient media stream decoding, resource prediction and quality-of-service (QoS) management on multi-core processors.
Quality of service - Multi-core processor - Cross-platform - Technology - Business
PrePrint: On Formal Designing of Ambient Intelligence Applications
This paper reports our practical experience of designing Ambient Intelligence (AmI) applications and a methodology, based on formal methods, that we have defined to support designers during their work.
Ambient Intelligence - Methodology - Formal methods - Psychology - Business
PrePrint: An Empirical Study of Commercial Antivirus Software Effectiveness
Despite the widespread use of antivirus software (AV) malware is pervasive in today’s computing environment. This paper presents an empirical study on the effectiveness of six commercial AVs against Windows malware collected from April to July 2009. A subset of the studied AVs performs new-to-the-market behavior-based detection in addition to traditional signature-based detection. The study shows that the AVs can identify at most 62.15% of the malware on the first day of collection. 8.61% of the malware are not detected by any of the studied AVs for more than a month after being collected. During the malware’s execution, the AVs with behavior-based detection provide protection against modifications to certain system and network registry keys, but leave some keys (e.g. a Microsoft-Word key controlling macro execution) unprotected, leading to security breaches. Behavior-based detection also prevents code injection and malicious behaviors (e.g. download non-executable files with executable content), but not all of them.
Anti-Virus - Security - Malware - Windows - Malicious Software
PrePrint: Using Modeling and Simulation to Evaluate Enterprises’ Risk Exposure to Social Networks
The adoption of Social Networks by employees poses a new series of threats for organizations, including data leakage. Organizations need to better understand the implications and how to react. We aim at making progress in this area by analyzing some of the key risks that enterprises could face. We explore the suitability of using an analytic approach, which involves modeling and simulation, to investigate how to answer to a few strategic questions: what are the actual risks for an organization, given a specific context? How to mitigate them? What are the financial and organizational implications in doing this?
Simulation - Social network - Organization - Business - Technology
PrePrint: The Coordination Pyramid: A Perspective on the State of the Art in Coordination Technology
Any software development project uses software tools that assist its developers in coordinating their efforts. These tools, termed coordination technologies in this paper, have undergone remarkable changes over time in the functionality that they offer. We contribute a novel perspective on this historical trend with our Coordination Pyramid, a framework that recognizes four distinct paradigms of coordination and classifies coordination technologies according to which paradigm they primarily support. Although historical in its construction, the Pyramid has strong implications for both current practice and future re-search directions. With respect to practice, the Pyramid helps organizations in identifying and articulating future coordination needs, mismatches that exist between these needs and the portfolio of coordination tools presently in use, and solution strategies for addressing these mismatches. With respect to research, the Pyramid clearly highlights several trends in how tools have historically evolved and can be anticipated to evolve in future.
Software development - Programming tool - Technology - Companies - Consultants
PrePrint: IntellBatt: The Smart Battery
This article introduces IntellBatt; a novel design of a multi-cell battery. IntellBatt exploits the cell characteristics to enhance battery lifetime, to ensure safe operation and to deliver better performance. Experiments were performed using Li ion cells and a portable DVD player. Simulation of the obtained current trace with IntellBatt have shown an enhancement of battery lifetime by 22%.
Lithium-ion battery - Battery - Business - Batteries - DVD
PrePrint: Parallelism via Multithreaded and Multicore CPUs
Multicore and multithreaded CPUs have become the new approach to obtaining increases in CPU performance. This survey compares multicore and multithreaded CPUs currently on the market, and discusses the underlying design decisions, performance, power efficiency, and software concerns in relation to application and workload characteristics.
Parallel computing - Thread - Central processing unit - Design - Hardware
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Currently in IEEE Software Magazine
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PrePrint: Refactoring For Usability In Web Applications
Refactoring was originally conceived as a technique for enhancing the design of an existing code base by applying small behavior-preserving transformations to the code. Later research extended its scope to other software artifacts, such as design models, and widened its intent to improve additional software quality factors, such as performance. In this paper we discuss how to improve the usability of a Web application by applying refactoring on its design structure. We also classify each refactoring by the specific usability factor it improves and the bad usability smells it targets. Some examples of Web Model Refactorings illustrate our claims.
Code refactoring - Programming - Refactoring - Design - Methodologies
PrePrint: Predictable and Progressive Testing of Multi-threaded Code
Developing concurrent software is hard. Testing concurrent software is harder. While sequential program testing has many useful concepts, techniques, and tools (for example, assertions, unit testing, test-driven development, code coverage, test generation tools etc.), the testing workbench for concurrent programs, in comparison, is quite bare. We present a new testing tool for concurrent multi-threaded programs, called CHESS, which repeatedly executes a multi-threaded program while guaranteeing predictable and deterministic scheduling and progressively exploring more schedules so as to uncover errors quickly.
testing - Unit testing - Programming - Thread - Code coverage
PrePrint: What Makes APIs Hard to Learn? The Answers of Developers
Most software projects reuse components exposed through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which provide developers with access to implemented functionality. APIs have grown large and diverse, raising the question of how usable they really are. This article reports on a study of the obstacles professional developers at Microsoft faced when learning how to use APIs. The study was grounded in developers' experience, collected through a survey and interviews. The resulting data showed that resources for learning an API were critically important, and shed light on three API learning obstacles: The need discover the design and rationale of the API on a need-to-know basis, the challenge of finding credible usage API examples at the right level of complexity, and the challenge of understanding inexplicable API behavior. The article describes each of these challenges in detail, and discusses associated implications for API users and designers.
PrePrint: People Over Process: Key People Challenges in Agile Development
There is a common perception that, while there may be some ‘teething’ problems experienced during the initial transition to agile, people are much happier, engaged and ultimately more productive in these environments. This study shows that this belief may not always hold true, identifying many serious ‘people’ challenges experienced by 17 large multinational organisations, all using agile for more than three years. The cases provide an interesting insight in that they involve cases where agile was implemented in a top-down manner across the organisations or at least across business units. This is in contrast to most accounts of agile which involve voluntary, bottom up adoption on small co-located teams developing systems deemed to be suitable for agile development. The people issues uncovered include a broad range of problems from recruitment of agile staff, to training, motivation and performance evaluation among others. The paper will conclude with a set of actionable recommendations as to how organisations can overcome these challenges, based on the better practices uncovered in the cases studied.
Business - agile development - Programming - Methodologies - Agile
IEEE Software - September/October 2010 (Vol. 27, No. 5)
IEEE Software
PrePrint: The Business Goals Viewpoint
Architectures come about through forces and needs other than those captured in traditional requirements documents. A business goal expresses why a system is being developed and what stakeholders in the developing organization, the customer organization, and beyond aspire to achieve through its production and use. Business goals can provide the rationale for requirements, and help identify missing or superfluous requirements. Business goals can also influence an architecture directly, even without affecting requirements at all. A business goals viewpoint can help architects and organizations capture their business goals in a precise and unambiguous form, which in turn will help architects design systems that are more responsive to organizational needs.
Business - Design - Architect - Organization - Construction and Maintenance
PrePrint: Visual Tools for Software Architecture Understanding: A Stakeholder Perspective
Many visualization tools are proposed for helping software professionals gain insight effectively and efficiently in the architecture of large-scale systems. However, despite considerable effort invested in the construction of such tools and recent advances in the field of software visualization, most such tools still have a limited impact in the software industry. In this article, we analyze the possible causes of this state of affairs, based on our experience with visualization tools in the industry. We argue that visualization tool adoption can be framed in a lean development setting as a value versus waste proposition. We examine this model for three types of potential visualization stakeholders: technical users, project managers, and consultants. For each stakeholder type, we observe a different definition of value and waste, and derive potential guidelines for visualization tool adoption.
Construction - Project manager - Industry-Specific - Visualization - Geography
PrePrint: Requirements-Driven Design of Service-Oriented Interactions
Designing service-oriented interactions requires addressing concerns of many stakeholders across enterprise boundaries. To ensure that stakeholders’ concerns are well-understood and properly addressed, we modularize them into four viewpoints that cover representations ranging from business goals to service messaging protocol. We propose a framework for interaction design that helps maintain consistency between representations across the viewpoints. The framework allows stakeholders to collaborate on reconciling their business needs and automatically obtain messaging protocols that satisfy these needs. The viewpoints and the framework enable a requirements-driven collaborative interaction design process.
Business - Service-oriented architecture - Design - Programming - Languages
PrePrint: Strategies Facilitating Software Product Transfers
Globalization of software work became a common way of how the market operates today. As a consequence of cost reduction strategies many product-focused software companies started to ship their products to their offshore sites, including both insourcing and outsourcing to offshore locations. Unfortunately, moving software products from one site to another is not always a good business neither for the organization nor for the product. In this article we discuss our findings from studying software insourcing transfers in Ericsson AB, a large software product development company headquartered in Sweden. Our findings suggest that certain product, people and process related characteristics can facilitate the execution of an offshore insourcing transfer. Based on research conducted together with the company, this article shares a list of key factors alleviating transfers and seven strategies facilitating transition of software work across remote sites.
Outsourcing - Business - India - Business and Economy - Computers and Internet
PrePrint: iUCP - Estimating interactive software project size with enhanced use-case points
This paper describes an approach to adapt the use-case point (UCP) estimation method to agile development of interactive software. Creating size estimates early in the development lifecycle is a challenge; they require that developers agree on the concepts driving the estimations and rely on historical data and constant feedback and fine-tuning. Here we propose several changes to the original UCP estimation method to enhance the consistency of the estimations emerging from the modeling concepts of actor and use-case. We take advantage of the enhanced information that can be extracted from usage-centered design (usageCD) that devotes attention to aspects like weighting actors and uses-cases for complexity. We exploit user-roles, essential use-cases and the usageCD architecture to assign complexity factors to actors and use-cases and use these to calculate the unadjusted UCPs reflecting the complexity of the requirements. We exploit user-roles as the main basis for weighting complex actors. Conversely we propose to extract the complexity of use-cases from essential use-case steps depicted through user intentions and system responsibilities and also the analysis classes extract from those for the usageCD architecture. We support our claim through an empirical study that shows that estimations based on modified UCP are more consistent—that is, they exhibit less inter-estimator variance—than those based on the original method.
Use case - Estimation - Agile software development - Variance - Estimator
PrePrint: Scientific Software Testing: Analysis with Four Dimensions
This paper describes a code testing exercise with an example of scientific software. As part of our analysis of the exercise, we examined four dimensions of testing: context, goals, technique, and adequacy. We started the exercise with approaches commonly described in software engineering literature. During the exercise, testing activities shifted to something more suitable for the situation. Using the four dimensions, we analyze this shift. Goals changed from general to specific goals for the scientist, and testing techniques shifted to those that more strongly used and supported the expertise of the scientist. In the end, we had a testing exercise that made better use of the scientist's dual role of developer and user.
PrePrint: Oh Dear, We Bought Our Competitor
This article describes the process of rationalizing from several functionally overlapping systems owned within an organization, to just one, based on the experiences from ten cases. This is a not uncommon scenario after e.g. company acquisitions and mergers, or it may be the result of development efforts in different units in an organization, which may have started in the small but have been growing until a point where the two independent efforts have to be synchronized in order to continue. We present the experiences from the ten cases showing how the challenges related to both technology and people can be addressed.
PrePrint: Agile Model-Driven Development in Practice
This paper presents practical experiences and lessons learned in defining and implementing an Agile Model-Driven Development process using MDD tools chain. This process and its implementation inherit the merits of Scrum, Extreme Programming, and the Unified Software Development Processes. The experience data demonstrates that combining MDD practices with agile development process can significantly reduce software development cycle time and increase productivity and quality. Keywords: Agile process, MDD, Scrum, UML modeling
PrePrint: Extending languages by leveraging compilers - from Modelica to Optimica
Combining attribute grammars with object-oriented programming supports a new kind of declarative programming, allowing compilers to be built in a highly extensible manner. By leveraging a base compiler, extended languages can be supported at a relatively low cost. Recent work shows the applicability of the technique to general-purpose programming languages like Java. In this article, we illustrate the approach using a case study for domain-specific languages: An extensible compiler was built for the physical systems modeling language Modelica, and leveraged to support a new extended language, Optimica.
PrePrint: Scrapheap Software Development: Lessons from an Experiment on Opportunistic Reuse
Many organizations implicitly rely on opportunistic reuse as a low-cost mechanism for extending existing software systems and exploring new product ideas. Such strategies are also commonly used as an informal way to introduce and promote reuse in organisations that may not have the resources to set up a systematic reuse programme. Scrapheap software development is a particular form of opportunistic reuse that has an emphasis on scavenging reusable functionality from discarded projects and systems. In this article we present a study that examines a microcosm of scrapheap software development in order to derive generalisable and transferable lessons to inform its use in different development contexts.
PrePrint: First Impression Management for Newly Initiated Open Source Software Projects
One area that has been largely ignored in the Open Source Software literature is the means by which newly initiated OSS projects can attract developers in order to sustain their vitality. In light of the fact that majority of them are eventually abandoned, more attention needs to be paid to how newly initiated OSS projects can effectively and efficiently attract more developers. Drawing upon the impression management literature, more specifically, first impression management, the authors explore the potential partial role that the initial presentation of newly initiated OSS projects plays in attracting developers. The preliminary findings from a pilot study including interviews and an exploratory quantitative analysis are presented for further research.
PrePrint: Software industry performance – ‘what you measure is what you get’
Software industry overall performance is uneven and at first sight puzzling. Delivery to time and budget is notoriously bad and productivity shows limited improvement over time, yet quality can be amazingly good. Customers largely bear the costs of the poor aspects of performance. Many factors drive this performance. This paper explores connections which suggest there may be causal links between (a) the commonly-used performance metrics, estimating methods and processes, (b) the incentives placed on suppliers, and (c) the resulting observed performance. The paper proposes a set of possible improvements to current metrics and estimating methods and processes, and concludes that software professionals must educate their customers on the levers that are available to obtain a better all-round performance from their suppliers.
PrePrint: Operational and Strategic Learning in Global Software Development - Implications from two Offshoring Case Studies in Small Enterprises
Small to medium-sized software enterprises (SME) increasingly participate in offshoring activities. Detecting market niches and deploying highly flexible software development approaches are seen as key competitive abilities of SME. Therefore, it is of major importance to learn how offshoring affects these capabilities which are closely related to organizational learning. We present case studies from two German companies that engage in offshoring of software development. By comparing the cases with each other, we highlight the different structures the companies chose for their development work and how these structures were enacted in practice. Furthermore, we show how related practices affect strategic and operational aspects of Argyris et al.'s (1985) conception of single- and double-loop learning. Our case studies show that organizational learning is a problem for SME engaged in offshoring and that an inability for double-loop learning can even lead to failures in case of organizational restructuring.
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Currently in IEEE Internet Computing
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PrePrint: Search Computing: an Approach for Managing Complex Search Queries
Search computing (SeCo) focuses on building the answers to complex search queries like "Where can I attend an interesting conference in my field close to a sunny beach?", by interacting with a constellation of cooperating search services, using ranking and joining of results as the dominant factors for service composition. The well known paradigm of service computing has so far been neutral to the specific features of search applications and services. To address this weakness, search computing advocates a new approach where search, join and ranking are the central aspects for service composition.
search - Search Engines - Google - Computing - Multi-Search
PrePrint: On the Quality of Information for Web 2.0 Services
Although many Web 2.0 applications explore multimedia content, most of them allow users to associate textual information - textual features - with it. Indeed, despite their lack of editorial control, these textual features are still the primary source of information for several relevant services (e.g., searching). Previous efforts in assessing the quality of these features focus mainly on tags, thus neglecting the potential of other features, besides targeting a single application. We here take a step further by assessing and comparing the quality of four textual features for supporting information services in three popular applications. Our analyses are performed on large collected datasets by estimating, via heuristics and user experiments, feature usage, descriptive and discriminative powers.
Multimedia - Information - Google - Site Management - FAQs Help and Tutorials
PrePrint: Facing Architectural and Technological Variability of Rich Internet Applications
The advent of Rich Internet Applications has involved an authentic technological revolution providing Web users with advanced requirements similar to desktop applications. At the same time, RIAs have multiplied the possible architectural and technological alternatives complicating development and increasing risks. The real challenge is to select the right alternatives among the existing RIA variability, thus creating an optimal solution able to satisfy most user requirements. To face this challenge, for the RIA development process, we propose an extended OOH4RIA approach to introduce architectural and technological aspects at the design phase, to propagate these decisions to the rest of concerns and to provide a closer match between the modeled system and the final implementation.
PrePrint: Separating Operational and Control Behaviors: A New Approach to Web Services Modeling
Developing flexible business applications is one of the ultimate objectives behind the use of Web services. Before taking part in such applications (sometimes critical), each Web service should be modeled so that its execution can be monitored and design problems can be early identified and addressed. In this article, we propose a novel approach for modeling Web services by distinguishing two types of behavior, namely operational and control. The operational behavior defines the business logic, which underpins the functioning of a Web service, and the control behavior guides the execution progress of this operational behavior by identifying the actions to take and enforcing the constraints to satisfy. This guidance takes place through conversational messages that these behaviors exchange. We developed a prototype system that assists service engineers in specifying, enforcing, and monitoring these behaviors, thereby achieving a better design of Web services.
IEEE Internet Computing - September/October 2010 (Vol. 14, No. 5)
IEEE Internet Computing
PrePrint: Addressing Information Overload in the Scientific Community
In this paper we present a dissemination model that extends from the notion of scientific journal to overcome the problem of information overload in the scientific community. We focus on the issues related to having access to interesting scientific content, and to narrowing down the discovery process only to known sources (venues, authors) when dealing with vasts amounts of information. In this paper we present the liquid journal model, concepts, methods, and the supporting platform.
Information overload - Scientific journal - Information - Scientific community - Knowledge Management
PrePrint: Incentive Mechanisms in P2P Media Streaming Systems
This paper highlights the need to curb free-riding in P2P media streaming systems and discusses the mechanisms by which this could be accomplished. Free riding, whereby a peer utilizes network resources, but does not contribute services could have a huge impact on the efficacy of blue streaming systems, leading to scalability issues and service degradation. We discuss why BitTorrent-like tit-for-tat mechanisms cannot be simply tailored and used in streaming. Even though the problem of free riding is more severe in P2P media streaming than in file sharing, the deployed systems still lack incentive schemes. In this paper, we categorize, analyze, and compare a range of incentive mechanisms proposed for P2P streaming systems in the literature and discuss future research issues for these schemes to be deployed in practice.
Filesharing - BitTorrent - Streaming media - Tit for tat - Broadcasting
PrePrint: Exploitation of Social Tagging for Outperforming Traditional Recommender Systems Techniques
The problem of information overload may lead users to wonder if they are missing items that would interest them. Recommender systems help users cope with this problem by using their likes to recommend the items with higher preference. Up to date, most of recommenders have used users' ratings, information about the user's profile, and/or metadata describing the items. Since web 2.0 applications are achieving great acceptance, we propose to use information obtained from social tagging to improve the recommendations. As this type of annotation has the advantage of reflecting users' point of view, instead of content creator's one, reasoning about this tagging metadata should increase the quality of the recommendations. To illustrate our findings, we introduce queveo.tv, a web 2.0 TV program recommender, which combines content-based and collaborative filtering techniques, and present a novel tag-based recommender to enhance our recommending engine by improving the coverage and diversity of the suggestions.
Information overload - Collaborative filtering - Metadata - Recommender system - Information
PrePrint: Transparent Insertion of Custom Logic in HTTP(S) Streams Using PbProxy
Many of today’s web-based systems could benefit greatly from recent research aimed at making information exchanges more secure, reliable, semantically understandable, and self-improving. However, cost considerations associated with making changes and testing limit the acceptance and deployment of new technologies. This paper describes PbProxy, a flexible proxy that enables transparent insertion of custom logic in HTTP and HTTPS interactions, and illustrates insertion of behavior-based prevention of phishing attacks, machine learning of web service procedures, and web browsing over disruption tolerant networks into existing applications. PbProxy encapsulates common functionality into a proxy base and supports customizable plugins to foster code reuse.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol - Proxying and Filtering - Machine learning - HTTP Secure - Hosted Proxy Services
PrePrint: What makes a high quality user-generated answer?
Community-driven Question Answering (CQA) services on the Internet enable users to share content in the form of questions and answers. Nonetheless, questions usually attract multiple answers of varying quality from the user community. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to identify high quality answers from a group of candidate answers obtained from semantically similar questions that match with the new question. To do so, a three-component quality framework comprising social, textual and content-appraisal features of user-generated answers in CQA services was developed and tested on Yahoo! Answers. The results of our logistic regression analysis revealed content-appraisal features to be the strongest predictor of quality in user-generated answers. Specifically, these features include dimensions such as comprehensiveness, truthfulness and practicality. Going forward, the quality framework developed in this paper may be used to pave the way for more robust CQA services.
PrePrint: On Popularity in the Blogosphere
The more outgoing and informal social nature of the blogosphere opens the opportunity for exploiting more socially-oriented features, such as credibility and popularity, for searching, recommendation, and other tasks. In this article, we provide evidence that one of these features, namely blog popularity, has been underexploited by current search engines, including specialized ones, and that there is low correlation between blog popularity and their perceived importance in the Web graph as measured by PageRank. Moreover, we also provide evidence that incorporating popularity into the search engine’s ranking may result in significant gains in retrieval effectiveness and thus user satisfaction.
PrePrint: Compiler Transformations to enable Synchronous Execution in an Asynchronous RIA Runtime
RIAs provide an immersive experience that blends the internet’s expansive reach with the rich performance of the desktop. These applications handle the concerns of presentation on the client enabled by sophisticated client runtimes and rendering infrastructure. The client applications typically connect to the server using asynchronous communication protocols which allows the user to continue to interact with the application without getting blocked on the server call latency. While this programming model enables high user interactivity, it increases the complexity of synchronizing multiple pieces of program logic. This increased complexity can be alleviated if synchronous program execution is enabled without causing the UI to block. We describe an innovative technique based on compiler transformations that enables synchronous execution on an asynchronous RIA programming model. Our method involves using the compiler to modify the RIA using a block chaining algorithm wherein asynchronous functions are transformed into a sequence of synchronously executing blocks.
PrePrint: Facing Architectural and Technological Variability of Rich Internet Applications
The advent of Rich Internet Applications has involved an authentic technological revolution providing Web users with advanced requirements similar to desktop applications. At the same time, RIAs have multiplied the possible architectural and technological alternatives complicating development and increasing risks. The real challenge is to select the right alternatives among the existing RIA variability, thus creating an optimal solution able to satisfy most user requirements. To face this challenge, for the RIA development process, we propose an extended OOH4RIA approach to introduce architectural and technological aspects at the design phase, to propagate these decisions to the rest of concerns and to provide a closer match between the modeled system and the final implementation.
PrePrint: NAN: Near-me Area Network
Due to the increasing popularity of mobile Internet and location-enabled mobile devices in recent years, a new type of communication network is emerging, and we call it Near-me Area Network (NAN). It focuses on the communication among the wireless devices in close proximity, creating a new kind of application domain. In this article, we will introduce NAN, review the existing applications, and most importantly point out the challenges for the NAN applications.
PrePrint: Podcasting: An Internet-Based Social Technology for Blended Learning
Although previous research reveals that podcasting has the potential to enhance student learning, there has been no in-depth analysis of why and how podcasting improves student learning. Our empirical study shows that podcasting, e-Learning, and traditional face-to-face teaching can be seamlessly integrated into a Blended Learning (b-Learning) environment to create a push-pull mode of learning. Our field tests reveal a perceived fitness between podcasting technology and specific learning tasks and demonstrate that the push-pull blended learning model in general and podcasting in particular can enhance students’ learning satisfaction. Our empirical study also reveals that students generally feel a higher social presence in classes and achieve better academic results if they are involved in the development of course podcasts. This research opens the door to the application of emerging Internet technologies to improve student learning.
PrePrint: Comprehensive Monitoring of BPEL Processes
The distributed ownership of Service Oriented Systems has led to an increasing focus on run-time management solutions. Service Oriented Systems can heavily change after deployment, hampering their quality and reliability. They can change their service bindings, or providers can modify the internals of their services. Monitoring is critical for these systems, to keep track of the behavior and find out whether anomalies have occurred. The paper presents SECMOL (Service Centric Monitor- ing Language), a general monitoring specification language. The clear separation of concerns between data collection, data computation, and data analysis allows for high degrees of flexibility and scalability. It also presents a concrete projection of the model onto three different monitor- ing frameworks.
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