Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations

The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform’s architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments.     

Device-Independent Architecture for ubiquitous applications

The part of the Internet of Things composed of devices that directly interact with users has grown considerably in the past years. With new smartphones, tablets and other Internet-enabled devices that appear on the market, this trend is still increasing. However, existing application development processes and tools, designed for single device applications, do not allow developers to fully and efficiently address this opportunity. Applications are developed for a particular type of devices or a particular programming platform. This limits the number of potential users and makes it difficult to seamlessly use an application on multiple devices owned by users. To take full advantage of the Internet of Things, applications should be able to run on any device—they should be ubiquitous. In this paper, we present a concept of Device-Independent Architecture, which provides separation of applications from devices and facilitates development of device-independent applications. Additionally, the separation introduced by the Device-Independent Architecture enables implementation of multi-device scenarios where a single application employs multiple devices at the same time. The experiment described in the paper proves that such device-independent applications indeed may be used on any suitable device—they have a chance to become ubiquitous.     

EWS-Based Management Application Interface and Integration Mechanisms for Web-Based Element Management

Web-based network element management provides an administrator with the ability to configure and monitor network devices over the Internet using a Web browser. The most direct way to accomplish this is to embed a Web server [Embedded Web Server (EWS)] into a network device, and use that server to provide a Web-based management user interface constructed with HTML, graphics, Java and other features common to Web browsers. In this paper we present EWS-based management application interface mechanisms for use between embedded management applications and embedded Web servers. We propose a guideline for choosing an efficient interface mechanism, which is based on the characteristics of management information and Web documents. A Web-based management user interface through embedded Web servers has many advantages such as ubiquity, platform independence and user-friendliness. In order to be truly useful, a Web-based management user interface must have a low development cost and a short development time. We provide effective integration mechanisms for each interface. We validate these mechanisms by implementing them in an Internet router.     

基于J2EE开发平台的统一用户接口系统模型

目前计算机不再是惟一访问Internet的设备。为了使企业Web应用系统同时支持多种访问Internet的设备，给出了一个统一用户接口系统模型，该模型在于J2EE开发平台，采用MVC（Model-View-Controller)编程方法，将用户显示界面，流程控制和业务逻辑进行分离，简化了开发过程，方便支持新的Internet用户接口，减少了系统维护工作量，该模型已成功应用于某电力调度局Web信息发布系统中，很好地满足了用户需求。     

MobiTran:一种面向智能手机的PC版Web应用转化技术

随着移动互联网的快速发展,人们可以通过包括智能手机和平板电脑在内的移动计算设备来访问和使用Web应用。然而,目前已有的Web应用大多是针对PC设计的,因此通过移动计算设备直接访问时,可能出现信息显示不全、界面布局混乱、用户体验变差、需要耗费较多流量等问题。重新开发符合移动设备特性的Web应用是一种最直接的解决方案,但是开发成本和代价较大,并且同时维护PC版和移动版两个不同的应用版本也会带来更高的成本。提出一种面向开发者的Web应用移动版本半自动转化技术并实现了支持工具MobiTran:首先,对PC版本Web应用的界面进行自动转化,使之适应移动设备的屏幕尺寸;然后,通过支持开发者手工对界面的样式和布局进行修改,定制拆分子页面以控制数据流量,同时加入适应移动设备操控特点的元素;最终,生成一个供移动设备访问的移动版本Web应用。对主流网站的测试结果表明:MobiTran可以将原网页自动地转化为适合移动设备宽度的新网页,转化后的网页清晰无溢出并可以较大限度地维持新页面与原页面风格一致;在自动转化过程中,可以较少地丢失页面信息并较大限度地保证原页面的功能;转化后的新页面相比原页面消耗数据流量较小。     

Applying model-driven engineering to the development of Rich Internet Applications for Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) applications have been gradually ported to the Web in search of a global platform for the consumption and publication of data and services. On the Internet, apart from techniques for data/knowledge management, BI Web applications need interfaces with a high level of interoperability (similar to the traditional desktop interfaces) for the visualisation of data/knowledge. In some cases, this has been provided by Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The development of these BI RIAs is a process traditionally performed manually and, given the complexity of the final application, it is a process which might be prone to errors. The application of model-driven engineering techniques can reduce the cost of development and maintenance (in terms of time and resources) of these applications, as they demonstrated by other types of Web applications. In the light of these issues, the paper introduces the S^m4RIA-B methodology, i.e., a model-driven methodology for the development of RIA as BI Web applications. In order to overcome the limitations of RIA regarding knowledge management from the Web, this paper also presents a new RIA platform for BI, called RI@BI, which extends the functionalities of traditional RIAs by means of Semantic Web technologies and B2B techniques. Finally, we evaluate the whole approach on a case study—the development of a social network site for an enterprise project manager.     

Policy-based dynamic reconfiguration of mobile-code applications

Global wireless networks have opened the way to a ubiquitous Internet computing environment in which a variety of portable devices remain connected to the Internet fabric - even as their locations change continuously - and access to data and services is independent of both device type and location. In this environment, applications must be able to change the location of their execution. In addition, they must allow heterogeneous and resource-limited portable devices to download only the device-specific software components needed for execution. Code mobility enables dynamic customization and configuration of ubiquitous Internet applications. Mobility complicates application programming by requiring developers to define when and where to move which components under varying operating conditions. A policy-based implementation framework supports high-level reconfiguration strategies that separate mobility concerns from application functionality.     

普适计算环境下的嵌入式设备监控模型

针对普适计算环境下对嵌入式Internet技术的要求,设计了一个面向非网络设备的嵌入式监控模型,通过该模型可以将不具备网络接口的设备连入Internet,实现远程监控;首先对该模型的管理系统和被管系统进行了描述;接着对该模型的主要功能模块SNMP管理器、SNMP代理以及嵌入式Web服务器进行了具体的设计;最后将该模型应用到了对UPS设备的远程监控中,并在实际应用中测试了其网络性能与实时性能,证明该模型能够很好的满足普适计算环境下的嵌入式技术应用的需要。     

MicroMAIS: executing and orchestrating Web services on constrained mobile devices

Mobile devices with their more and more powerful resources allow the development of mobile information systems in which services are not only provided by traditional systems but also autonomously executed and controlled in the mobile devices themselves. Services distributed on autonomous mobile devices allow both the development of cooperative applications without a back‐end infrastructure and the development of applications blending distributed and centralized services. In this paper, we propose MicroMAIS: an integrated platform for supporting the execution of Web service‐based applications natively on a mobile device. The MicroMAIS platform is composed of mAS and μ‐BPEL. The former allows the execution of a single Web service, whereas the latter permits the orchestration of several Web services according to the WS‐BPEL standard. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The implementation of a secure and pervasive multimodal Web system architecture

While most users currently access Web applications from Web browser interfaces, pervasive computing is emerging and offering new ways of accessing Internet applications from any device at any location, by utilizing various modes of interfaces to interact with their end users. The PC and its back-end servers remain important in a pervasive system, and the technology could involve new ways of interfacing with a PC and/or various types of gateways to back-end servers. In this research, cellular phone was used as the pervasive device for accessing an Internet application prototype, a multimodal Web system (MWS), through voice user interface technology.This paper describes how MWS was developed to provide a secure interactive voice channel using an Apache Web server, a voice server, and Java technology. Securing multimodal applications proves more challenging than securing traditional Internet applications. Various standards have been developed within a context of Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) platform to secure multimodal and wireless applications. In addition to covering these standards and their applicability to the MWS system implementation, this paper also shows that multimodal user-interface page can be generated by using XSLT stylesheet which transforms XML documents into various formats including XHTML, WML, and VoiceXML.     

Improving device-aware Web services and their mobile clients through an aspect-oriented,model-driven approach

ContextMobile devices have become an essential element in our daily lives, even for connecting to the Internet. Consequently, Web services have become extremely important when offering services through the Internet. However, current Web services are very inflexible as regards their invocation from different types of device, especially if we consider the need for them to be adaptable when being invoked from mobile devices.ObjectiveIn this paper, we provide an approach for the creation of flexible Web services which can be invoked transparently from different device types and which return subsequent responses, as well as providing the client’s adaptation as a result of the particular device characteristics and end-user preferences in a completely decoupled way.MethodAspect-Oriented Programming and model-driven development have been used to reduce both the impact of service and client code adaptation for multiple devices as well as to facilitate the developer’s task.ResultsA model-driven methodology can be followed from system models to code, providing the Web service developer with the option of marking which services should be adapted to mobile devices in the UML models, and obtaining the decoupled adaptation code automatically from the models.ConclusionWe can conclude that the approach presented in this paper provides us with the possibility of following the development of mobile-aware Web services in an integrated platform, benefiting from the use of aspect-oriented techniques not only for maintaining device-related code completely decoupled from the main functionality one, but also allowing a modularized non-intrusive adaptation of mobile clients to the specific device characteristics as well as to final user preferences.     

基于Web服务的GIS系统构想

Internet的发展正在进入以服务为特征的第二代。Web服务概念的提出对Internet应用的发展产生了积极的影响,越来越多的公司和企业开始利用Web服务技术实现企业级应用和在Internet构建电子商务平台。该文结合当前Internet应用的发展趋势,分析了当前GIS应用的现状,提出了基于Web服务的GIS系统及其体系结构,并对该体系结构的特点和实现的关键技术作了介绍。     

DAN网络WBDM管理模型的研究

针对设备域网络DAN(Device Area Network)的网络管理，提出了一个WBDM(Web-based Device Management)管理模型，解决了家庭、企业设备环境中传统管理模型中存在的专用性、复杂性、人机界面和Web化等问题，为系统管理员在任何时间和任何地点提供了友好的、平台无关的、易于使用的远程监控嵌入式设备的方法。     

War Internet die einzige Option? Welchen Weg soll die Wirtschaftsinformatik gehen?

In global competition, the Internet turned out to be the single and hegemonial infrastructure for communication. It has become the “nervous system” of today’s networked economy. While the first phase provided communication services, like e-mail, the WWW has established an interactive platform to allow easy access to advanced services. Now, in its “third” or cooperative phase, the Internet will finally lead to an ubiquitous informatization where business processes and applications become interleaved beyond the boundaries of enterprises. For this phase, many analogies to the emergence of the Internet can be observed.     

网络的Web应用开发技术研究

互联网络应用的普及使得数据挖掘技术的重点已经从传统的基于数据库的应用转移到了基于Web的应用。Web数据挖掘旨在改进网络系统性能,提高运行效率,具有良好的发展和应用前景,必将得到越来越多的关注。从Web应用开发技术入手,就Web挖掘技术的概念、步骤及Web应用开发的过程和测试技术作了较为详细的阐述。     

新一代分布式计算模型--XML Web Services

从Windows DNA多层体系结构出发,简单回顾了Internet及分布式计算模型的发展历程,讨论了支撑XML WebServices的几种标准协议。郑重论述了XML Web Services的基础结构,联网形式,解决方案,生存期以及XML Web Services的平台Microsoft.NET平台,并给出了一个用Microsoft.NET构建的基于XML Web Services的典型实例。     

J2EE上构建基于XML的统一用户接口系统模型

随着Internet的发展,PC不再是惟一访问Internet的设备。为了使企业的Web应用系统能够同时支持多种Inter net接入设备的访问,文章给出了一个基于XML的统一用户接口系统模型。该模型采用J2EE架构并基于XML开发,将用户显示界面、流程控制和业务逻辑进行分离,简化了开发过程,减少了系统维护工作量。该模型已成功应用于某网上社保系统,很好地满足了用户的需求。     

Modeling,simulation, and practice of floor control for synchronous and ubiquitous collaboration

Floor control refers to the need for coordinating activities occurred in synchronously cooperating applications shared among collaborators. We address this for ubiquitous collaboration—the capability of multiple users to link together with disparate access device anytime and anywhere. Floor control has been studied for years but most researchers focus on relaxed coordination mechanisms with stationary devices that allow updates by any user on any object and resolve the uncoordinated updates. In this paper we present a floor control mechanism, called XGSP-Floor, which implements a coordination mechanism at application level for enabling users to consistently share the same resource in real time (synchronous collaboration) in ubiquitous collaboration environment. The implementation platform on cell phone devices may not be new. But we believe the implementation and experiment for XGSP-Floor on cell phone devices is a new challenge in ubiquitous collaboration environment even though the coordination mechanism can intuitively impose a tremendous overhead in worst case. We also describe the results of the modeling of XGSP-Floor and formal verification to prove the correctness of the modeling using Colored Petri Nets. We describe lessons learned and discuss future work.     

一个安全异步Web服务应用平台的实现方案

近年来，Web服务以其开放性、标准性和简便性而得到了迅速推广，被广泛应用于Internet应用程序中。在许多应用项目中，常常需要构建一个安全异步Web服务应用平台来安全地、异步地调用Web服务。该文提出了一个安全异步Web服务应用平台的基本架构和关键技术。并以一个实际应用项目为例，介绍了基于Microsoft SOAP Toolkjt和SSL技术的安全异步Web服务应用平台的实现方案。     

基于Struts框架的Web表单快速开发平台*

首先简要介绍了MVC设计模式和目前的Web应用框架,以及基于MVC模式发展出的Struts Web应用框架,分析了它们在开发基于Web表单应用上的不足。介绍了在Struts框架基础上,通过开发一个可视化的Web表单编辑器,以支持Struts应用的快速部署,并提出了一个表单引擎的概念,从表单开发到表单实例数据处理构建了一个完整的快速开发平台,基于此平台可以大大缩减传统Web开发的周期。