Extending UML to model Web 2.0‐based context‐aware applications

Web 2.0 Mashups offer entirely new opportunities for context‐aware application (CAA) developers by integrating Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate interoperability among heterogeneous context‐aware systems. From a software engineering perspective, a visualized approach for Web 2.0‐based CAA modeling is crucial. Current CAA development, however, cannot provide a conceptual model for Web 2.0‐based CAA. Therefore, the development efficiency and potential for reuse are decreased. The UML is a general purpose modeling language with potential for use in many application domains. However, UML often lacks elements needed to model concepts in specific domains, such as Web 2.0‐based CAA modeling. To address the above issues, this study presents the Web 2.0‐based CAA UML profile, a UML profile for modeling Web 2.0‐based CAA. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A combinatory framework of Web 2.0 mashup tools,OWL-S and UDDI

The increasing number of Web 2.0 applications, such as wikis or social networking sites, indicates a movement to large-scale collaborative and social Web activities. Users can share information, add value to Web applications by using them or aggregate data from different sources creating Web applications (mashups) using specialized tools (mashup tools). However, Web 2.0 is not a new technology, but it rather embraces a new philosophy, treating the Internet as a platform. Several issues related to the Semantic Web vision, such as interoperability or machine understandable data semantics, are not tackled by Web 2.0. In this paper, we present our effort to combine semantic Web services (SWS) discovery frameworks, UDDI repositories and existing mashup tools in order to enhance the procedure of developing mashups with semantic mashup discovery capabilities. Towards this end, we introduce a social-oriented extension of OWL-S advertisements, their mapping algorithm on UDDI repositories and a semantic mashup discovery algorithm. Finally, we elaborate on the way our framework has been realized using the Yahoo Pipes mashup tool.     

Proposing a context-aware enterprise mashup readiness assessment framework

Web mashups have received a lot of attention recently as more enterprises are engaged in enterprise 2.0 initiatives. So far, there is insufficient research on the adoption and diffusion of Web mashups in an enterprise context. In this paper, we discussed the benefits and issues associated with enterprise mashups. We proposed a context-aware enterprise mashup readiness assessment framework to help enterprise managers and decision makers determine their needs and readiness for enterprise mashups. A case study was conducted to verify the usefulness of the proposed framework. The results show that our work can be used to guide enterprises with their decision making for the adoption of enterprise mashups and thus contribute to the development of a rigorous strategy for enterprise mashup adoption, development and diffusion.     

An Online Platform for Web APIs and Service Mashups

On the newly programmable Web, mashups are flourishing. Designers create mashups by combining components of existing Web sites and applications. Although rapid mashup proliferation offers many opportunities, a lack of standarization and compatibility offers considerable challenges. IBM Sharable Code is an online service platform for developing and sharing situational Web 2.0 applications and mashups. The platform is based on an innovative domain-specific language that streamlines and standardizes the development and deployment of applications consuming and exposing Web APIs. Parts of the DSL and the resulting applications and mashups can be shared and reused by members of the IBM Sharable Code community. In this article, the authors offer an overview of the platform's architecture and the DSL language at its core.     

End-User Development of Mashups with NaturalMash

Context: The emergence of the long-tail in the market of software applications is shifting the role of end-users from mere consumers to becoming developers of applications addressing their unique, personal, and transient needs. On the Web, a popular form of such applications is called mashup, built out of the lightweight composition of Web APIs (reusable software components delivered as a service through the Web). To enable end-users to build mashups, there is a key problem that must be overcome: End-users lack programming knowledge as well as the interest to learn how to master the complex set of Web technologies required to develop mashups. End-User Development (EUD) is an emerging research field dealing with this type of problems. Its main goal is to design tools and techniques facilitating the development of software applications by non-programmers.Objective: The paper describes the design and evaluation of NaturalMash, an innovative EUD tool for mashups (a mashup tool). NaturalMash aims at enabling non-professional users without any knowledge of programming languages and skills to create feature-rich, interactive, and useful mashups.Methods: The design of NaturalMash adopts a formative evaluation approach, and has completed three design and evaluation iterations. The formative evaluations utilize usability testing, think aloud protocol, questionnaires, observation, and unstructured interviews. Additionally, we compare the expressive power of naturalmash with the state-of-the-art mashup tools.Results: The results from the formative evaluations helped us identify important usability problems. From an assessment point of view, the results were promising and sggested that the proposed tool has a short and gentle learning curve in a way that even non-programmers are able to rapidly build useful mashups. Also, the comparative evaluation results showed that NaturalMash offers a competitive level of expressive power compared with existing mashup tools targeting non-programmers.Conclusion: As the evaluation results indicate, NaturalMash provides a high level of expressive power while it is still highly usable by non-programmers. These suggest that we have successfully achieved the objective of the proposed tool, distinguishing it from existing mashup tools that are either too limited or highly specialized for non-professional users.     

Data-driven synthesis of multiple recommendation patterns to create situational Web mashups

As a typical situational application,Web mashup reflects and accommodates some key features of Internetware paradigm.Mashup provides a development fashion that integrates data,computation and UI elements from multiple resources into a single Web application,and promises the quick rollout of creating potential new functionalities opportunistically.This paper focuses on the problem of recommending useful suggestions for developing data-driven mashups by synthesis of multiple patterns.We present a rapid and intuitive system called iMashupAdvisor,for aiding mashup development based on a novel automated suggestion mechanism.The key observation guiding the development of iMashupAdvisor is that mashups developed by different users might share some common patterns,for instance,selecting similar mashup components for similar goals,and gluing them in a similar manner.Such patterns could reside in multiple sources,e.g.,the data dependency between mashup components,the interaction between users and mashup components,or the collective intelligence from existing applications created and maintained by programmers,etc.iMashupAdvisor leverages the synthesis of these patterns to recommend useful suggestions for a partial mashup,such as the missing components,connections between them,or potentially relevant options,to assist mashup completion.This paper presents the data model and ranking metrics of the synthesis process,and introduces efficient algorithms for the retrieval of recommendations.We also experimentally demonstrate the efficiency of our approach for benefiting the proposed rapid mashup development.     

A systematic review of tools,languages, and methodologies for mashup development

Web 2.0 has become a powerful means of transmitting information in a number of fields, such as communication, e‐commerce, and entertainment. Nowadays, companies and organizations transmit specific information through different mechanisms, such as Web feeds and Web services. These data sources enable third parties to incorporate data from service providers into their own applications. On the basis of this understanding, mashups have emerged as a new approach to develop applications and which combine data and resources from heterogeneous sources—such as internal data sources, Web feeds, screen scraping, and Web services—with the aim of solving specific needs. Mashup development involves activities such as accessing heterogeneous sources, combining data from different data sources, and building graphical interfaces. These activities restrict the development of these kinds of applications only to experienced computer users. Today, a number of tools and programming languages are used to help carry out some of the aforementioned activities. These tools and programming languages have features enabling the integration of different technologies in order to solve problems such as data management from different data sources and content publication. If this is taken into account, there is a growing need to learn about the features, advantages, and disadvantages of these tools and programming languages in order to select the tool or language that best fits a specific need and a specific level of knowledge and experience in terms of software development. This paper presents a systematic review and analysis of the tools, programming languages, and software development methodologies involved in mashup development in order to learn more about the features and services provided by mashups. Furthermore, this research also explains the qualitative and quantitative evaluation used for the mashup development tools. The evaluation was performed in order to measure not only the usability of these tools but also the support that they provide for standardized features of Web development that they provide. Finally, new trends in the development of mashups are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Understanding Mashup Development

Web mashups are Web applications developed using contents and services available online. Despite rapidly increasing interest in mashups over the past two years, comprehensive development tools and frameworks are lacking, and in most cases mashing up a new application implies a significant manual programming effort. This article overviews current tools, frameworks, and trends that aim to facilitate mashup development. The authors use a set of characteristic dimensions to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of some representative approaches.     

Edge-cloud-enabled matrix factorization for diversified APIs recommendation in mashup creation

World Wide Web - A growing number of web APIs published on the Internet allows mashup developers to discover appropriate web APIs for polishing mashups. Developers often have to manually pick and...     

Web service API recommendation for automated mashup creation using multi-objective evolutionary search

Modern software development builds on external Web services reuse as a promising way that allows developers delivering feature-rich software by composing existing Web service Application Programming Interfaces, known as APIs. With the overwhelming number of Web services that are available on the Internet, finding the appropriate Web services for automatic service composition, i.e., mashup creation, has become a time-consuming, difficult, and error-prone task for software designers and developers when done manually. To help developers, a number of approaches and techniques have been proposed to automatically recommend Web services. However, they mostly focus on recommending individual services. Nevertheless, in practice, service APIs are intended to be used together forming a social network between different APIs, thus should be recommended collectively. In this paper, we introduce a novel automated approach, called SerFinder, to recommend service sets for automatic mashup creation. We formulate the service set recommendation as a multi-objective combinatorial problem and use the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) as a search method to extract an optimal set of services to create a given mashup. We aim at guiding the search process towards generating the adequate compromise among three objectives to be optimized (i) maximize services historical co-usage, (ii) maximize services functional matching with the mashup requirements, and (iii) maximize services functional diversity. We perform a large-scale empirical experiment to evaluate SerFinder on a benchmark of real-world mashups and services. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of SerFinder in comparison with recent existing approaches for mashup creation and services recommendation. The statistical analysis results provide an empirical evidence that SerFinder, significantly outperforms four state-of-the-art widely-used multi-objective search-based algorithms as well as random search.     

Knowledge Discovery in Services

Service mashups can be useful in understanding Web-scale workflows. Although creating a service mashup shares similar challenges with data integration, a more exciting aspect of this area is the ability to predict which services are viable candidates for a mashup. Such "service mashup recommendations" can enable knowledge discovery, an approach the author calls knowledge discovery in services (KDS).     

Composing enterprise mashup components and services using architecture integration patterns

Enterprise mashups leverage various source of information to compose new situational applications. The architecture of such applications must address integration issues: it needs to deal with heterogeneous local and/or public data sources, and build value-added applications on existing corporate IT systems. In this paper, we leverage enterprise architecture integration patterns to compose reusable mashup components. We present a service oriented architecture that addresses reusability and integration needs for building enterprise mashup applications. Key techniques to customize this architecture are developed for mashups with themed data on location maps. The usage of this architecture is illustrated by a property valuation application derived from a real-world scenario. We demonstrate and discuss how this state-of-the-art architecture design method can be applied to enhance the design and development of emerging enterprise mashups.     

基于MVC模式的Web用户界面建模

分析了企业信息系统的Web用户界面开发特性,研究了当前主流前端框架的MVC(模型-视图-控制器)设计模式应用,针对Web前端开发需求及最佳实践方法,提出了一种符合MVC用户界面开发最佳实践的组件化Web用户界面建模方法.设计一套抽象和描述Web用户界面组件的UML(统一建模语言)概要文件,从界面数据模型、界面组件模型到界面交互模型等3个方面完成Web用户界面建模.以一个装修行业定制型ERP(企业资源计划)系统为例,通过用户界面建模实践,验证了本建模方法的可行性、易用性和有效性.     

MDA-based visual modeling approach for resources link relationships using UML profile

Current XML editors do not provide conceptual modeling for XLink. This leads to inefficient development processes, and a low potential for reuse. To address these shortcomings, this study presents a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach with the UML profile to build XLink applications for various domains. This investigation demonstrates how users can use the UML profile to provide a conceptual and visual modeling for XLink applications, and automatically generate different XLink-based documents for various domains. The proposed methodology enables Web-based system developers to generate relationships between resources, and to improve software quality by adopting software engineering techniques in XML development.     

A model-driven approach to develop high performance web applications

The evolution of web technologies in the last few years has contributed to the improvement of web applications, and with the appearance of AJAX and Web 2.0 technology, a new breed of applications for the Internet has emerged: widgets, gadgets and mashups are some examples of this trend. However, as web applications become more and more complex, development costs are increasing in an exponential rate, and we believe that considering a software engineering methodology in the development process of this type of applications, contributes to the solution of this problem. In order to solve this question, this paper proposes a model-driven architecture to support web application development from the design to the implementation model. With this aim, the following tasks have been performed: first a new profile extends UML with new concepts extracted from the web domain, then a new framework supports web application development by composing heterogeneous web elements, and finally, a transformation model generates web applications from the UML extension proposed. The main contribution of this work is a cost and complexity reduction due to the incorporation of a model-driven architecture into the web application development process, but other advantages that can be mentioned are a high performance degree achieved by a prefetching cache mechanism, and a high reusability, since web elements can be reused in different web applications.     

An environment for End-User Development of Web mashups

End-User Development aims to find novel ways that are suitable and intuitive for end users to create their own applications. We present a graphical environment in which users create new mashups by directly selecting interaction elements, content and functionalities from existing Web applications without requiring the intervention of expert developers. Then, users just need to exploit a copy–paste metaphor to indicate how to compose the selected interactive content and functionalities in the new mashup. The environment is enabled by a Web-based platform accessible from any browser, and is suitable for users without particular programming skills. We describe the architecture of our platform and how it works, including its intelligent support, show example applications, and report the results of first user studies.     

Visualizing Design Patterns in Their Applications and Compositions

Design patterns are generic design solutions that can be applied and composed in different applications where pattern-related information is generally implicit in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams of the applications. It is unclear in which pattern instances each modeling element, such as class, attribute, and operation, participates. It is hard for a designer to find the design patterns used in an application design. Consequently, the benefits of design patterns are compromised because designers cannot communicate with each other in terms of the design patterns they used and their design decisions and trade-offs. In this paper, we present a UML profile that defines new stereotypes, tagged values, and constraints for tracing design patterns in UML diagrams. These new stereotypes and tagged values are attached to a modeling element to explicitly represent the role the modeling element plays in a design pattern so that the user can identify the pattern in a UML diagram. Based on this profile, we also develop a Web service (tool) for explicitly visualizing design patterns in UML diagrams. With this service, users are able to visualize design patterns in their applications and compositions because pattern-related information can be dynamically displayed. A real-world case study and a comparative experiment with existing approaches are conducted to evaluate our approach.     

面向服务领域软件系统的模型驱动建模方法

面向服务体系结构(SOA)的工程化和建模对现有的建模技术和方法提出了新的挑战.提出了一种基于web服务的领域服务原型系统的快速模型驱动建模框架.从服务构件的概念和标准统一建模语言(UML)2.0的建模构造出发,给出了一个综合的服务软件建模过程.在此基础上,讨论了模型驱动的web服务的特性描述,重点是介绍一种基于UML扩充机制的面向web服务描述语言(WSDL)的建模技术.通过一个流通领域的面向服务企业资源计划(ERP)系统的实际建模,展示了所提方法是切实可行的.     

Biomashups: the new world of exploratory bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics is dominated by online databases and sophisticated web‐accessible tools. As such, it is ideally placed to benefit from the rapid, purpose specific combination of services achievable via web mashups. The recent introduction of a number of sophisticated frameworks has greatly simplified the mashup creation process, making them accessible to scientists with limited programming expertise. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of mashups as a new approach to bioinformatic experimentation, focusing on an exploratory niche between interactive web usage and robust workflows, and attempting to identify the range of computations for which mashups may be employed. While we treat each of the major frameworks, we illustrate the ideas with a series of examples developed under the Popfly framework ^‡ . Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.