Technical framework for Internetware: An architecture centric approach

Being a new software paradigm evolved by the Internet, Internetware brings many challenges to the traditional software methods and techniques. Sponsored by the national basic research program （973）, researchers in China have developed an architecture centric technical framework for the definition, incarnation and engineering of Internetware. First of all, a software model for Internetware is defined for what to be, including that Internetware entities should be packaged as components, behaving as agents, interoperating as services, collaborating in a structured and on demand manner, etc. Secondly, a middleware for Internetware is designed and implemented for how to be, including that Internetware entities are incarnated by runtime containers, structured collaborations are enabled by runtime software architecture, Internetware can be managed in a reflective and autonomic manner, etc. Thirdly, an engineering methodology for Internetware is proposed for how to do, including the way to develop Internetware entities and their collaborations by transforming and refining a set of software architectures which cover all the phases of software lifecycle, the way to identify and organize the disordered software assets by domain modeling, etc.     

A software architecture centric engineering approach for Internetware

As a new software paradigm evolved by the Internet, Internetware brings many challenges for the traditional software development methods and techniques. Though architecture-based component composition (ABC) approach is originated in the traditional software paradigm, it supports the engineering of Internetware effectively due to its philosophy, rationales and mechanisms. ABC has three major contributions to the en- gineering of Internetware in detail. First, the feature oriented domain modeling method can structure the “disordered”“software entities” to “ordered Internetware” bottom-up in the problem space. Second, the architecture centric design and analysis method can support the development of self-adaptive Internetware. Third, the component operating platform is a reflective and self-adaptive middleware that not only provides Internetware with a pow- erful and flexible runtime infrastructure but also enables the self-adaptation of the structure and individual entities of Internetware.     

How commercial involvement affects open source projects: three case studies on issue reporting

Whereas most research on Internetware has focused on new technologies for keeping track of a changing Internet,little attention has been paid to the software development process.A large portion of the software running the Internet is open source software.Open source software is developed both by volunteers and commercial companies,often jointly.Companies get involved in open source projects for commercial reasons,and bring with them a commercial software development process.Thus,it is important to understand how commercial involvement affects the software development process of open source projects.This article presents case studies of three open source application servers that are being developed jointly by a volunteer community and one primary software company.We are interested in better understanding developer behavior,specifically task distribution and performance,based on whether the developer is an external contributor,e.g.,a volunteer working in their spare time,or a commercial developer from inside the primary backing company who is being paid for their time.To achieve this,we look at issue reporting as an example of commercial involvement in open source projects.In particular,we investigate the distribution of tasks among volunteers and commercial developers by studying the source of reported issues and quantify the task performance on user experience via the issue resolution speed.We construct measures based on historical records in issue tracking repositories.Our results show that,with intensified commercial involvement,the majority of issue reporting tasks would be undertaken by commercial developers,and issue resolution time would be reduced,implying a better user experience.We hope our methods and results provide practical insights for designing an efficient hybrid development process in the Internetware environment.     

On environment-driven software model for Internetware

Internetware is envisioned as a general software paradigm for the application style of resources integration and sharing in the open, dynamic and uncertain platforms such as the Internet. Continuing the agent-based Internetware model presented in a previous paper, in this paper, after an analysis of the behavioral patterns and the technical challenges of environment-driven applications, a software-structuring model is proposed for environment-driven Internetware applications. A series of explorations on the enabling techniques for the model, especially the modeling, management and utilization of context information are presented. Several proto-typical systems have also been built to prove the concepts and evaluate the techniques. These research efforts make a further step toward the Internetware paradigm by providing an initial framework for the construction of context-aware and self-adaptive software application systems in the open network environment.     

Internetware: An Emerging Software Paradigm for Internet Computing

The Internet is undergoing a tremendous change towards the globalized computing environment.Due to the open,dynamic and uncontrollable natures of the Internet,software running in the Internet computing environment has some new features,which bring challenges to current software technologies in terms of software model,software operating platform,software engineering approaches and software quality.Researchers in China have proposed the term "Internetware" to present the emerging software paradigm.Sponsored by the National Basic Research 973 Program,several research practices have been done on the Internetware in the past decade.This paper summarizes the progress and status of the Internetware researches.A technical solution framework for the Internetware paradigm is proposed from four aspects:the Internetware software model defines what the Internetware is to be;the Internetware middleware determines how to run the Internetware applications;the engineering methodology determines how to develop the Internetware applications;the Internetware quality assurance determines how well the Internetware applications can perform.The paper also discusses the ongoing research issues and future trends of Internetware.     

Secure System Modeling: Integrating Security Attacks with Statecharts

Software security is becoming an important concern as software applications are increasingly depending on the Internet, an untrustworthy computing environment. Vulnerabilities due to design errors, inconsistencies, incompleteness, and missing constraints in software design can be wrongly exploited by security attacks. Software functionality and security, however, are often handled separately in the development process. Software is designed with the mindset of its functionalities and cost, where the focus is mainly on the operational behavior. Security concerns, on the other hand, are often described in an imprecise way and open to subjective interpretations. This paper presents a threat driven approach that improves on the quality of software through the realization of a more secure model. The approach introduces systematic transformation rules and integration steps for integrating attack tree representations into statechart-based functional models. Through the focus on the behavior of an attack from the perspective of the system behavior, software engineers can clearly define and understand security concerns as software is designed. Security analysis and threat identification are then applied to the integrated model in order to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities at the design level.     

Online approach to feature interaction problems in middleware based system

As a popular infrastructure for distributed systems running on the Internet, middleware has to support much more diverse and complex interactions for coping with the drastically increasing demand on information technology and the extremely open and dynamic nature of the Internet. These supporting mechanisms facilitate the development, deployment, and integration of distributed systems, as well as increase the occasions for distributed systems to interact in an undesired way. The undesired interactions may cause serious problems, such as quality violation, function loss, and even system crash. In this paper, the problem is studied from the perspective of the feature interaction problem （FIP） in telecom, and an online approach to the detection and solution on runtime systems is proposed. Based on a classification of middleware enabled interactions, the existence of FIP in middleware based systems is illustrated by four real cases and a conceptual comparison between middleware based systems and telecom systems. After that, runtime software architecture is employed to facilitate the online detection and solution of FIP. The approach is demonstrated on J2EE （Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition） and applied to detect and resolve all of the four real cases.     

A strategy for service realization in service-oriented design

Recently service orientation is becoming a mainstream approach for building large scale software systems. A key requirement in service-oriented design is the de- pendability of service. It stipulates that the behavior of services is controllable. Formal models can aid in constructing software in a dependable manner. They can describe ser- vices precisely and compose them together consistently. This paper presents a strategy for service realization based on a novel layered formal model. When a service is provided or required via internet, the semantic consistency becomes critical issue. Our architecture tackles the issue by proposing a novel scheme: defining contract of a service to keep semantic information. Although service-oriented design is our prime target, the contract models, to a large extent, are independent of the framework of design and therefore ap- plicable to large scale software design in general.     

Hierarchical message bus-based software architectural style

As the size and complexity of software systems increase, the design and specification of overall system structure become more significant issues than the choice of algorithms and data structures of computation. An appropriate architecture for a system is a key element of its success. Based on the practice of Jadebird software production line, this paper proposes a software architectural style based on hierarchical message buses, named JB/HMB. In this style, the component model consists of external interfaces, static structure and dynamic behavior, which depicts a component from different aspects. Supported by message buses, components interact with one another by messages, which can be used to describe distributed and concurrent systems well. JB/HMB style supports stepwise decomposition and refinement, and runtime system evolution. Finally, characteristics of JB/HMB style are summarized as a conclusion, and future research directions are specified.     

Towards Software Architecture and Mechanisms for Improving Runtime Variability of Internetware System

As an emerging software paradigm, Internetware is proposed to handle openness, dynamism of software systems in the context of Internet, which implies that such software systems typically have runtime variability that can be improved dynamically to handle various or even unexpected changes of requirements and open environment. Though many progresses of Internetware software technologies have been made to support the adaptation, evolution, context-awareness, etc. of Internetware, how to construct Internetware systems with the ability to improve their runtime variability is still a great challenge in the literature of software engineering. In this paper, we propose software architecture and mechanisms for Internetware systems to support the improvement of their runtime variability by combining software variability and autonomic computing techniques. The Internetware system is organized as three levels that are consist of variable autonomic elements and Internetware entities, and architecture of these software entities is defined and discussed respectively. Moreover, we put forward a series of runtime mechanisms based on these levels, including module selection, intermediator and horizontal management, to realize operations upon the variation points and variants in software architectures and thus achieve the improvement of runtime variability. We develop a sample of Personal Data Resource Network to depict the requirements and scenario of improving runtime variability, and further study the case based on our proposed approach to show its effectiveness and applicability.     

A Trust-Based Approach to Estimating the Confidence of the Software System in Open Environments

Emerging with open environments, the software paradigms, such as open resource coalition and Internetware, present several novel characteristics including user-centric, non-central control, and continual evolution. The goal of obtaining high confidence on such systems is more di?cult to achieve. The general developer-oriented metrics and testing-based methods which are adopted in the traditional measurement for high confidence software seem to be infeasible in the new situation. Firstly, the software develo...     

基于Agent的网构软件构件模型及其实现

网构软件代表了Internet环境下的一种新型的软件形态,但仍然面临着外部环境显式化、软件实体主体化、运行机制自适应等问题.从构件的角度出发,提出了EBDI(electronic business document exchange)结构以表示能够根据环境变化实施自主行为的构件,利用动态绑定关系解释了构件的自适应演化特征.根据形式化的Role模型,描述了构件的运行状态、自主运行及自适应演化运行机制.开发了DAgent-Internetware原型作为网构软件的支撑平台,支持以DAgent为构件的网构软件从设计到实现、部署、运行、演化等一系列流程.     

服务化软件系统的运行时资源动态分配方法

Web软件是一种典型的基于Internet的软件形态,它自身的特点决定了其运行时的可靠保障以及质量优化都需要系统具有一定的自适应能力。对于服务化的Web软件系统而言,各服务之间的动态资源分配是实现运行时自适应的重要基础。针对这一问题,构建了一个基于Web的在线购物系统,并在此基础上对基于Web服务资源动态分配及负载均衡的Web软件系统运行时自适应技术进行了研究。对Web软件系统的运行时自适应管理问题进行了分析,提出并实现了资源动态分配及负载均衡方法,在此基础上针对在线购物系统进行了有效性验证。实验结果表明,优化的资源动态分配及负载均衡方法可以有效地提高Web软件系统的运行质量。     

Runtime software architecture based on reflective middleware

Copyright by Science in China Press 2004 Since its first literate identification and discussion[1], software architecture (SA) has become an important subfield of software engineering, receiving increasing attention from both academic and industrial communities. SA describes the gross structure of a software system with a collection of components, connectors and constraints[2]. In gen-eral, SA acts as a bridge between requirements and implementation and provides a blue-print for system cons…     

Analysis and case study on multi-dimensional scalability of the Internet architecture

This paper presents the definition of multi-dimensional scalability of the Internet architecture, and puts forward a mathematical method to evaluate Internet scalability based on a variety of constraints. Then, the method is employed to study the Internet scalability problem in performance, scale and service scalability. Based on the examples, theoretical analysis and experimental simulation are conducted to address the scalability issue. The results show that the proposed definition and evaluation method of multi-dimensional Internet scalability can effectively evaluate the scalability of the Internet in every aspect, thus providing rational suggestions and methods for evaluation of the next generation Internet architecture.     

一种情境驱动的网构软件体系架构与支撑环境

本文从网构软件Internet环境下涉及的各类事物和事件情境及情境的整个生命周期出发,以情境驱动为核心,对网构软件的体系结构与支撑环境展开研究,以支持服务实体的自适应、自演化行为。本文研究了Internet环境下服务实体交互与协同关系中的各种情境构成,给出了一个适合网构软件的情境本体定义。在此基础上,给出了一种基于情境感知的网构软件体系架构,并描述了在这一架构下网构软件按需聚合和动态演化的模型与机制。围绕该应用场景,结合服务实体实际运行时的特点及要素,给出了该体系架构下网构软件的支撑环境软件设计。最后,本文给出了一种基于OSGi服务平台的支撑环境参考实现。