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.     

Preface

The vision of ''Internet as a computer'' motivates many technical trends, like pervasive computing, grid computing, service computing and recently, cloud computing, as well as some business trends, like modern service industry, digital economy and smarter planet. These evolutionary changes demand that the software systems which are running on the open and dynamic Internet have to be autonomous, context-sensitive, continuous-reactive, evolutionary, and proactive, and the software entities dispersed on distributed nodes over the Internet will be turned into self-contained, autonomous and adaptive. Thus, like the information Web, i.e. the World Wide Web, these Internet-based software entities will constitute a software Web. That gives birth a new software paradigm. A portmanteau term ''Internetware'' is used to denote the future software-web. An Internetware system will be able to perceive the changes of the open and dynamic environment, respond to the changes, and exhibit the context-aware, adaptive and trustworthy behaviors. The mission of Internetware may challenge many aspects of software technologies, from the operating platforms and the programming models to the engineering approaches. Internetware 2010, the second Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware, aims to provide an interactive forum where researchers and professionals from multiple disciplines and domains meet and exchange ideas to explore and address the challenges brought by Internetware. The symposium was held at Suzhou, China, during the 2-4 of Nov, 2010. Thirty three papers were submitted and each of them was reviewed by at least two members of an International Program Committee. Among them, 12 have been accepted (which means an acceptance rate of 36%) for their quality as well as for their interesting terms of discussions for the symposium attendees. This special issue contains 7 revised and substantially extended papers from the 12 based on presentations at the symposium: ......     

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.     

Software Evolution for Moving into and Moving within Internetware Paradigm

Internetware has been an emerging software paradigm to best support computing in the Internet era. Internetware emphasises accommodating the open, dynamic and uncontrollable natures of Internet, which directly and indirectly relates software evolvability. This paper observes that evolving non-Internetware software into the Internetware paradigm and evolving software within Internetware will be two main research and practical issues, and hence proposes an integrated approach to address these two issues. The proposed framework is based a three-dimension structure, with System Functions, System Quality and System models as dimensions. With this framework, evolving software into internetware paradigm can be viewed mainly as changing the qualities of existing software and evolving software within Internetware paradigm can be viewed mainly as changing software functions. The involved prototype tool, working examples and experiments conducted, are used to illustrate the proposed approach.     

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.     

Editorial: Internetware of the Age

While the infrastructure of computing shifting from isolated computers to Internet-linked resources, the software industry transfers its focus from computing products to dependable services. That''s one of the reasons why pervasive computing, grid computing, service computing and cloud computing are introduced on the open and dynamic Internet-linked platform. The communication abilities it introduced enable various resources exchanging and sharing freely, and participating in the community in the social network. There are three layers in such a platform: computing infrastructure, software services and information web. The underline layer, computing infrastructure, provides computing and communication facilities, and the surface layer, information web, is full of information recombination and consuming. The layer of software services serves as a factory to process constantly emerging and heterogeneous dynamic information using distributed, autonomous, and evolvable computing facilities. Therefore, services provided by such software systems should be adaptive, situational, trustworthy, autonomous and etc. To achieve flexible objectives, these services can be coordinated in various styles such as integration, cooperation, orchestration and etc. A portmanteau term \Internetware" is used     

Towards a General Component Model for Web-Based Applications

The cost effective development of web applications is perhaps one of the most challenging areas of software engineering today. Not only are the problems to be solved, and the solution technologies to be used, in web application development among the most rapidly changing in the software industry, but the business pressures of cost, quality and time-to-market are among the most extreme. Web application development therefore has potentially the most to gain from software reuse approaches that can offer a greater return on development time than traditional approaches. However, simply combining ideas from these reuse paradigms and traditional web development technologies in ad-hoc ways will not result in sustainable improvements. In this paper we describe a systematic way of combining the benefits of component-based development and model driven architectures, two important reuse approaches, to support the cost effective development and maintenance of web applications. After first defining a suitably abstract component-model, the paper explains how component architectures can be systematically and rigorously modeled using UML. It then describes a powerful technique, known as stratification, for separating the various cross cutting aspects of a web application such that a suitable platform specific architecture can be traceably generated. Finally, the paper introduces a technique for increasing the trustworthiness of components by giving them the capability to check their deployment environment at run-time.     

Adapting transformations to metamodel changes via external transformation composition

Evolution is inherent to software systemsbecause of the rapid improvement of technologies and business logic. As a software development paradigm, model driven engineering (MDE) is also affected by this problem. More concretely, being metamodels the cornerstone of MDE, their evolution impacts the rest of software artefacts involved in a development process, i.e., models and transformations. The influence over models has been tackled and partially solved in previous works. This paper focuses on the impact over transformations. We propose an approach to adapt transformations by means of external transformation composition. That is, we chain impacted transformations to particular adaptation transformations which deal with either refactoring/destruction changes or construction changes. Our approach semi-automatically generates such transformations by using the AtlanMod matching language, a DSL to define model matching strategies. To provide with a proof of concept for our proposal, we adapt transformations written in terms of object-relational database metamodels when such metamodels evolve in time.     

Towards a framework for the development of adaptable service-based applications

Service-oriented computing is a promising computing paradigm which facilitates the composition of loosely coupled and adaptable applications. Unfortunately, this new paradigm does not lend itself easily to traditional software engineering methods and principles due to the decentralised nature of software services. The goal of this paper is to identify a set of engineering activities that can be used to develop adaptable service-based applications. Rather than focusing on the entire service-based application development life-cycle, this paper will focus on adaptation-specific processes and activities and map them to an existing high-level service-based application development life-cycle. Existing software engineering literature as well as research results from service engineering research is reviewed for relevant activities. The result is an adaptation framework that can guide software engineers in developing adaptable service-based applications.     

Java的发展前景与就业方向探讨

众所周知,21世纪是计算机网络的世纪,而Java语言正是服务于网络编程的。Java是目前发展最快的计算机语言。用它可以很方便地在网上编写应用软件,如数据库、商业、工程计算、网络连接、绘图、设备控制等应用软件。目前最流行的网上商务、网上出版、网上信息交流,甚至网上设备遥控等许多应用软件都是用Java语言编写的。学好java语言对于学生未来的就业非常有帮助。     

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.     

Bayanihan: building and studying web-based volunteer computing systems using Java

Project Bayanihan is developing the idea of volunteer computing, which seeks to enable people to form very large parallel computing networks very quickly by using ubiquitous and easy-to-use technologies such as web browsers and Java. By utilizing Java’s object-oriented features, we have built a flexible software framework that makes it easy for programmers to write different volunteer computing applications, while allowing researchers to study and develop the underlying mechanisms behind them. In this paper, we show how we have used this framework to write master-worker style applications, and to develop approaches to the problems of programming interface, adaptive parallelism, fault-tolerance, computational security, scalability, and user interface design.     

工作流驱动、面向服务的构件组装平台

通过分析基于构件组装的网构软件开发流程,设计了一种工作流驱动、面向服务的构件组装平台CCP-I,该平台在工作流引擎的支持下,可以实现服务构件的动态装配以及构件和Web表单间的松耦合。最后,介绍了基于开源项目的CCP-I平台的实现方案。该平台能够为网构软件支撑平台的研究提供参考和借鉴。     

A survey of approaches for the visual model-driven development of next generation software-intensive systems

Software-intensive systems of the future are expected to be highly distributed and to exhibit adaptive and anticipatory behavior when operating in highly dynamic environments and interfacing with the physical world. Therefore, visual modeling techniques to address these software-intensive systems require a mix of models from a multitude of disciplines such as software engineering, control engineering, and business process engineering. As in this concert of techniques software provides the most flexible element, the integration of these different views can be expected to happen in the software. The software thus includes complex information processing capabilities as well as hard real-time coordination between distributed technical systems and computers.In this article, we identify a number of general requirements for the visual model-driven specification of next generation software-intensive systems. As business process engineering and software engineering are well integrated areas and in order to keep this survey focused, we restrict our attention here to approaches for the visual model-driven development of adaptable software-intensive systems where the integration of software engineering with control engineering concepts and safety issues are important. In this survey, we identify requirements and use them to classify and characterize a number of approaches that can be employed for the development of the considered class of software-intensive systems.     

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.     

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 comprehensive solution for application‐level adaptation

Driven by the emergence of mobile and pervasive computing there is a growing demand for context‐aware software systems that can dynamically adapt to their run‐time environment. We present the results of project MADAM that has delivered a comprehensive solution for the development and operation of context‐aware, self‐adaptive applications. The main contributions of MADAM are (a) a sophisticated middleware that supports the dynamic adaptation of component‐based applications, and (b) an innovative model‐driven development methodology that is based on abstract adaptation models and corresponding model‐to‐code transformations. MADAM has demonstrated the viability of a general, integrated approach to application‐level adaptation. We discuss our experiences with two real‐world case studies that were built using the MADAM approach. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Containerization technologies: taxonomies,applications and challenges

Modern scientific research challenges require new technologies, integrated tools, reusable and complex experiments in distributed computing infrastructures. But above all, computing power for efficient data processing and analyzing. Containers technologies have emerged as a new paradigm to address such intensive scientific applications problems. Their easy deployment in a reasonable amount of time and the few required computational resource make them more suitable. Containers are considered light virtualization solutions. They enable performance isolation and flexible deployment of complex, parallel, and high-performance systems. Moreover, they gained popularity to modernize and migrate scientific applications in computing infrastructure management. Additionally, they reduce computational time processing. In this paper, we first give an overview of virtualization and containerization technologies. We discuss the taxonomies of containerization technologies of the literature, and then we provide a new one that covers and completes those proposed in the literature. We identify the most important application domains of containerization and their technological progress. Furthermore, we discuss the performance metrics used in most containerization techniques. Finally, we point out research gaps in the related aspects of containerization technology that require more research.

     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Social Computing

Broadly stated, social computing takes a computational approach to the study and modeling of social interactions and communications. It also encompasses the development of technologies supporting these interactions. In recent years, we've seen social computing impact numerous information and communications technology (ICT) fields. It's attracted significant interest from not only researchers in the computing and social sciences but also software and online game vendors, Web entrepreneurs, political analysts, and digital-government practitioners, among others. This special issue samples the state of the art social-computing research from several perspectives: the overall paradigm of social-computing research; technological support for social-computing applications; cognitive modeling and architecture of agents and agent societies; and social-computing applications in areas such as terrorist network analysis, competitive business strategies, and agent behavior in financial markets. This article is part of a special issue on social computing.