Building an organization-specific infrastructure to support CASE tools

CASE tools are notorious for forcing organizations to adapt to a standard development methodology. The underlying assumption is that a universally applicable development method exists and it is up to the organization to conform to that method. But software development is no longer a homogeneous field. As computers are applied to an increasingly diverse set of applications, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the different demands these domains place on the development process. Our solution to this dilemma is to create an organization-wide development infrastructure based on accumulated experiences within application and technical domains. The domain lifecycle formalizes a process for accumulating project experiences and creating domain knowledge than can be used to increase product quality and improve development productivity. Supporting the domain lifecycle eases development of software that has been developed previously in the organization, freeing designers to concentrate on less well-known elements of an application.     

A reference model for deploying applications in virtualized environments

Modern scientific research has been revolutionized by the availability of powerful and flexible computational infrastructure. Virtualization has made it possible to acquire computational resources on demand. Establishing and enabling use of these environments is essential, but their widespread adoption will only succeed if they are transparently usable. Requiring changes to applications being deployed or requiring users to change how they utilize those applications represent barriers to the infrastructure acceptance. The problem lies in the process of deploying applications so that they can take advantage of the elasticity of the environment and deliver it transparently to users. Here, we describe a reference model for deploying applications into virtualized environments. The model is rooted in the low‐level components common to a range of virtualized environments and it describes how to compose those otherwise dispersed components into a coherent unit. Use of the model enables applications to be deployed into the new environment without any modifications, it imposes minimal overhead on management of the infrastructure required to run the application, and yields a set of higher‐level services as a byproduct of the component organization and the underlying infrastructure. We provide a fully functional sample application deployment and implement a framework for managing the overall application deployment. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Enterprise computing: the Java factor

The ubiquitous availability of Web browsers on multiple platforms and user familiarity with browser technology provide numerous advantages: a uniform interface; support for multimedia and user interaction and collaboration; a simple communication protocol that has been implemented in all major hardware and software platforms; and support by almost all vendors who package Web engines within their products. Such factors have expedited the implementation of network centric computing as a productive infrastructure for corporate environments. The addition of Java, with its ability to build cross platform application logic into a browser, gives network centric computing the potential to better meet enterprise computing needs. Because it lets users interact with the application on the client rather than the server, Java enables better utilization of both the server and the client's computational capability. Java can also provide sessions state information (for client side session control and resource management) in an otherwise stateless Web world. Besides naturally decentralizing application execution, Java makes it possible to decentralize application deployment. In large enterprises, organization wide applications such as personnel timekeeping or document routing can benefit from Java implementations. One immediate impact is a noticeable reduction of the server load during peak hours. Finally, Java enabled browsers can provide greater functionality than HTML     

手机仿真取证系统浅析——Android系统仿真实战

随着各种手机的推广,手机应用程序的极大丰富,在实际取证工作中,我们经常会遇到对各种手机的应用程序取证,而现有对手机应用程序的分析技术刚刚起步,要实现对大部分应用程序使用痕迹的取证需要一段较长的时间。如何快速对手机应用程序进行取证成为取证工作的一个重要。因此本文提出了一个手机仿真取证系统的解决方案,并以Android系统为例进行介绍。     

Situated Software: Concepts, Motivation, Technology, and the Future

Situated software, a type of opportunistic software, is created by a small subset of users to fulfill a specific purpose. For example, business users have been creating situated software through mashups, which combine data from multiple sources on internal systems or the Internet. Situated software can change the way users access, perceive, and consume information, and can allow users to finally focus on what to do with information, rather than where to find it or how to get to it. However, situated software also has limitations. This article identifies situated software's role, provides examples of its use, traces the Internet's role in its rapid evolution, outlines areas where it is appropriate, describes its limitations, and presents enablers for adopting situated software in an enterprise.     

Representing situational knowledge acquired from sensor data for atmospheric phenomena

A recurrent problem in applications that build on environmental sensor networks is that of sensor data organization and interpretation. Organization focuses on, for instance, resolving the syntactic and semantic heterogeneity of sensor data. The distinguishing factor between organization and interpretation is the abstraction from sensor data with information acquired from sensor data. Such information may be situational knowledge for environmental phenomena. We discuss a generic software framework for the organization and interpretation of sensor data and demonstrate its application to data of a large scale sensor network for the monitoring of atmospheric phenomena. The results show that software support for the organization and interpretation of sensor data is valuable to scientists in scientific computing workflows. Explicitly represented situational knowledge is also useful to client software systems as it can be queried, integrated, reasoned, visualized, or annotated.     

性能测试的原理及其自动化工具的实现

软件组织在对其开发的系统进行性能测试时,可能需要自己编写一些性能测试的工具.但是,性能测试工具的编写是一件复杂的事情,性能测试工具需要满足以下要求：占用系统资源少,可扩展性好,使用性强,能够模拟大规模的用户,能模拟真实的环境等.探讨了在一般的企业级应用中性能测试的原理及基本要求,根据这些需求提出了一个性能测试工具的实现架构,分析了其中的一些关键技术.     

Object-oriented development of large applications

The state of object oriented application techniques is particularly troubling given that their deployment is being considered in relatively large applications and within large application-development organizations. GTE Telephone Operations is one such organization. The paper discusses how GTE has been working to reengineer its software development methods so that object-oriented application development will be feasible and repeatable for large applications     

New Attack Tricks Antivirus Software

Traditionally, antivirus products stop malicious software by recognizing code signatures unique to different types of malware. When the applications encounter a file with a code string that matches one in their database for a known virus, they block its access to the intended victim's computer. However, with the advent of Web 2.0, in which Web sites make it easy for users to add content, hackers have found a new way to spread malicious code and short-circuit the pattern-matching antivirus approach. DCO employs algorithms to change and disguise JavaScript-based malware code without making it less harmful, thereby keeping pattern-matching antivirus software from recognizing exploits.     

Modeling presentation layers of web applications for testing

Web software applications have become complex, sophisticated programs that are based on novel computing technologies. Their most essential characteristic is that they represent a different kind of software deployment—most of the software is never delivered to customers’ computers, but remains on servers, allowing customers to run the software across the web. Although powerful, this deployment model brings new challenges to developers and testers. Checking static HTML links is no longer sufficient; web applications must be evaluated as complex software products. This paper focuses on three aspects of web applications that are unique to this type of deployment: (1) an extremely loose form of coupling that features distributed integration, (2) the ability that users have to directly change the potential flow of execution, and (3) the dynamic creation of HTML forms. Taken together, these aspects allow the potential control flow to vary with each execution, thus the possible control flows cannot be determined statically, prohibiting several standard analysis techniques that are fundamental to many software engineering activities. This paper presents a new way to model web applications, based on software couplings that are new to web applications, dynamic flow of control, distributed integration, and partial dynamic web application development. This model is based on the notion of atomic sections, which allow analysis tools to build the analog of a control flow graph for web applications. The atomic section model has numerous applications in web applications; this paper applies the model to the problem of testing web applications.     

Adapting card sorting for blind people: Evaluation of the interaction design in TalkBack

This article reports the results of a research project conducted to address the lack of feedback provided by generic user eXperience (UX) design methods, specifically in the case of applications for blind users. The objective of this research was to determine whether the application of a modified card sorting interaction design method with blind users can provide valuable insights into the desirable architecture of the menus in an interactive software system. For the analysis of the effectiveness of this approach, we performed the test with 15 blind users, using a modified semi-closed card sorting method, focusing on the menu structure of specific software (Android TalkBack). As a result, we obtained significant feedback for menu organization that included the users suggestions for new tasks and categories. Based on these data, we recommend the use of the modified card sorting interaction design method to evaluate the usability of applications for blind users, because this method allows reliably defining how to select and order the menu items in an intuitive and friendly way that is specific for this type of users.     

Where We At? Mobile Phones Bring GPS to the Masses

Child tracking is just one of a host of mobile-phone applications that use GPS technology. Other applications include those for tracking the whereabouts of friends, pets, and employees, and those that let farmers survey and navigate their land, hikers create routes and download maps, and skiers check snow conditions and reserve seats on backcountry helicopters. Although consumers have yet to embrace such products en masse, application vendors who follow market predictions are no doubt hopeful. In its September 2006 US Wireless Business Location-Based Services 2006-2010 Forecast report, IDC predicted that more than half of US mobile-phone users will begin using location-based services within four years. The report also notes, however, that fewer than 2 percent of US mobile-phone users currently take advantage of such applications     

A methodological approach for user interface development of collaborative applications: A case study

In the last few years, the production of systems which support learning and group work has been high. However, the design and development of these types of systems are difficult, mainly due to the multidisciplinarity involved. Furthermore, the Graphic User Interface (GUI) of an application is receiving greater attention, since it can be decisive in determining if the application is accepted or rejected by users. Model-based design is a widespread technique in the user interface development process. While reviewing approaches that deal with the modeling and design of user interfaces supporting collaborative tasks, we have detected that there is no proposal that links interactive and collaborative issues. We have introduced a methodological approach to solve this shortcoming. This approach is called CIAM (Collaborative Interactive Application Methodology) and it is composed of several stages in which conceptual models are created using CIAN (Collaborative Interactive Application Notation). These models start by modeling the organization in which the application will be used, as well as the tasks that must be supported. In the initial stages, the organization and the collaborative tasks are modeled using high-level specifications. In the following stages, the level of detail increases and, finally, the interaction between the individual users and the application is modeled using ConcurTaskTrees (CTT) notation. The interaction model acts as a bridge between the design and the implementation of the Graphic User Interface. In this paper we present our methodological approach and an example of applying this method for user interface design of collaborative and interactive applications.     

Scene-Graph-As-Bus: Collaboration between Heterogeneous Stand-alone 3-D Graphical Applications

We describe the Scene-Graph-As-Bus technique (SGAB), the first step in a staircase of solutions for sharing software components for virtual environments. The goals of SGAB are to allow, with minimal effort, independently-designed applications to share component functionality; and for multiple users to share applications designed for single users.This paper reports on the SGAB design for transparently conjoining different applications by unifying the state information contained in their scene graphs. SGAB monitors and maps changes in the local scene graph of one application to a neutral scene graph representation (NSG), distributes the NSG changes over the network to remote peer applications, and then maps the NSG changes to the local scene graph of the remote application. The fundamental contribution of SGAB is that both the local and remote applications can be completely unaware of each other; that is, both applications can interoperate without code or binary modification despite each having no knowledge of networking or interoperability.     

“The Canary in the Coal Mine…” A cautionary tale from the decline of SourceForge

Forges are online collaborative platforms to support the development of distributed open source software. While once mighty keepers of open source vitality, software forges are rapidly becoming less and less relevant. For example, of the top 10 forges in 2011, only one survives today—SourceForge —the biggest of them all, but its numbers are dropping and its community is tenuous at best. Through mixed-methods research, this article chronicles and analyze the software practice and experiences of the project's history—in particular its architectural and community/organizational decisions. We discovered a number of suboptimal social and architectural decisions and circumstances that, may have led to SourceForge 's demise. In addition, we found evidence suggesting that the impact of such decisions could have been monitored, reduced, and possibly avoided altogether. The use of sociotechnical insights needs to become a basic set of design and software/organization monitoring principles that tell a cautionary tale on what to measure and what not to do in the context of large-scale software forge and community design and management.     

A Software Platform for Constructing Scientific Applications from Heterogeneous Resources

Support for heterogeneous processing is useful for increasing the functionality available to designers of scientific applications. For example, rather than implement an application requiring remote vector processing and local visualization as two separate programs, such support allows an alternative structure in which the application is a single logical program with transparent transfer of control and data between phases. In addition to being simpler and more intuitive, such structuring makes it feasible to enhance the way in which users interact with the application to do, for instance, model steering. Here a software platform that facilitates the construction of this type of scientific application is described. Its kev component is Schooner, an interconnection system that includes an intermediate data representation, a simple specification language, and a heterogeneous remote procedure call (RPC) facility; to provide sophisticated visualization capabilities and an execution framework, AVS is included as well. Two applications built using this platform, one from molecular dynamics and the other involving neural nets, are also described. One important conclusion is that enhanced monitoring and interaction facilities impose very little overhead for applications such as these.     

XML数据库与关系数据库协作研究

随着Internet中各类基于XML的应用特别是电子商务的飞速发展,作为处理XML应用中关键一环的XMLDB也得到了很大发展。目前,关系数据库(RDB)在各类商业应用中处于主导地位,如何将现有的关系数据库与XMLDB结合起来协调工作,就成为一个亟待解决的问题。该文介绍了一种XQL和SQL相互映射转换的方法,通过这种映射转换,用户就可以使用一种查询语言(XQL或SQL)同时查询和处理XML数据库和传统关系数据库,从而可以在充分发挥各自特点的情况下,实现两种不同数据库的共存与协作。     

A unified and flexible solution for integrating CRL and OCSP into PKI applications

Public key certificates (PKCs) are used nowadays in several security protocols and applications, so as to secure data exchange via transport layer security channels, or to protect data at the application level by means of digital signatures. However, many security applications often fail to manage properly the PKCs, in particular when checking their validity status. These failures are partly due to the lack of experience (or training) of the users who configure these applications or protocols, and partly due to the scarce support offered by some common cryptographic libraries to the application developers. This paper describes the design and implementation of a light middleware dealing with certificate validation in a unified way. Our middleware exploits on one side the libraries that have already been defined or implemented for certificate validation, and it constructs a thin layer, which provides flexibility and security features to the upper layer applications. In our current approach, this layer boasts an integrated approach to support various certificate revocation mechanisms, it protects the applications from some common security attacks, and offers several configuration and performance options to the programmers and to the end users. We describe the architecture of this approach as well as its practical implementation in the form of a library based on the famous OpenSSL security library, and that can be easily integrated with other certificate‐aware security applications. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The information center approach for developing computer-based information systems

Organizations which have used computers for a number of years are well acquainted with the software maintenance problem and the new-application development backlog. The first exists because computer programs require various types of changes throughout their life. The second has been created because so many systems development staff have to be assigned to software maintenance, and because many computer users have recognized the value of additional computer applications in their organization.It is believed that the concept of end-user computing has been used to relieve the new application development backlog in many organizations. In some, information centers have been implemented partly to support the development of computer applications by end-users. A survey was conducted to determine to what extent the information center approach is being used. Over one-half of the responding organizations reported their use. The survey included an identification of the functions provided by information centers to end-users and the responsibilities of both information center consultants and end-users. Recommendations are presented.     

一个基于Web的软件过程改进框架SPIF的实现

软件过程的理论日趋成熟，而基于软件过程改进模型的面向中小软件组织的应用程序却很少，因而造成一种情形，即管理者知道应该进行软件过程的改进，也知道有很多可以参考的规范与模型，但是，真正开始的时候，却不知道该如何着手。本文介绍一个基于Web的软件过程改进框架，试图给出一个解决问题的途径。该系统集成一组管理工具与相关知识库，用一种灵活的方式帮助组织确定适合自己的软件过程模型，从而以一种相对简洁方便的方式实现对软件过程的管理与改进。