A unified interface for integrating information retrieval

In this paper, we propose a unified interface and a flexible architecture for querying various information sources on the Internet and the WWW using both a popular object model and a data model. We propose an Integrated Information Retrieval (IIR) service based on the Common Object Service Specification (COSS) for Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and apply the Document Type Definition (DTD) of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to define the metadata of information sources for sharing the ontology between mediator and wrappers. The objective of using the IIR design is not only to provide programmers with a uniform interface for coding a software application that can query a variety of information sources on the Internet, but also to create a flexible and extensible environment that easily allows system developers to add new or updated wrappers to the system.     

Past, Present, and Future Trends in Software Patterns

For more than a decade, patterns have influenced how software architects and developers create computing systems. Design-focused patterns provide a vocabulary for expressing architectural visions and clear, concise representative designs and detailed implementations. Presenting software pieces in terms of their constituent patterns also lets developers communicate more effectively, with greater conciseness and less ambiguity. Software patterns influence how developers design and implement computing systems. This paper examine the software patterns' past, present, and future trends, which can help developers improve their projects.     

EOS: a real-time operating system adapts to applicationarchitectures

Rather than dictating the architecture of application software and hardware, a real-time operating system should be flexible enough to adapt to the application's needs. The EOS real-time operating system provides a modular, scalable software platform users can tailor to specific custom hardware architectures. Developers can use minimum configurations of EOS for simple systems or enhance it with their own code for complex systems. Ultimately, we provide a configurable software platform that helps embedded application developers create low-cost, time-effective products     

基于.NET的通用软件开发平台的研究与实现

介绍了一个基于微软.NET平台的通用软件开发平台,提出了一种基于插件连接模型的扩展机制.这种扩展机制允许用户使用插件来动态地为平台添加扩展点,使得整个平台具有结构简单、配置灵活、可扩展性强等优点.说明了如何使用.NET反射技术实现插件装载和实例化.     

A roadmap for implementing new manufacturing technology based on STEP-NC

Manufacturing is changing. New ideas of control, the maturity of CAM techniques and computer technology have enabled the definition of an advanced machine tool control standard, STEP-NC. STEP-NC is one part of a larger manufacturing picture with links to different manufacturing applications using the STEP suite of standards. STEP-NC is the key to a door behind which there is a rich field of research on manufacturing techniques and opportunities for lean, intelligent and flexible manufacturing. The problem is to pass through that door. Many potential users are waiting for a lead from control developers. Control developers are waiting for market interest. Existing legacy machinery and investment in traditional machining add inertia. Instead of having a clear development path, manufacturing has become something of a Gordian knot waiting to be disentangled. New research projects are addressing these issues as well, but this paper takes a different route in showing how strategic planning can lead to adoption of the new techniques in a phased way, a so-called ‘Roadmap’. The contribution of this paper is the manner in which the overall task of implementation has been subdivided into tasks and phases to achieve the introduction of the new technology.     

An approach for reverse engineering of design patterns

For the maintenance of software systems, developers have to completely understand the existing system. The usage of design patterns leads to benefits for new and young developers by enabling them to reuse the knowledge of their experienced colleagues. Design patterns can support a faster and better understanding of software systems. There are different approaches for supporting pattern recognition in existing systems by tools. They are evaluated by the Information Retrieval criteria precision and recall. An automated search based on structures has a highly positive influence on the manual validation of the results by developers. This validation of graphical structures is the most intuitive technique. In this paper a new approach for automated pattern search based on minimal key structures is presented. It is able to detect all patterns described by the GOF [15]. This approach is based on positive and negative search criteria for structures and is prototypically implemented using Rational Rose and Together.     

Building rich web applications with Ajax

Looks at how developers are going back to the future by building Web applications using Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a set of technologies mostly developed in the 1990s. A key advantage of Ajax applications is that they look and act more like desktop applications. Proponents argue that Ajax applications perform better than traditional Web programs. As an example, Ajax applications can add or retrieve new data for a page it is working with and the page will update immediately without reloading.     

基于Activiti+MongoDB的后勤自由流程信息系统

较大型单位的后勤保障时刻离不开流程管理信息系统,传统方法采用固定流程图和固定表单的方式,无法适应新形势下后勤灵活自主管理的要求.同时,传统信息系统采用的关系型数据库方式在适应当前后勤保障大数据时也捉襟见肘.本文设计并实现了使用Activiti和MongoDB的后勤自由流程信息系统,以自由灵活流程管理为目标,以关系型数据库辅助非关系型数据库为设计理念,给出了自由流程框架、关键接口和重要代码逻辑,以及两类数据库协同的设计方法.实现的系统有效地解决了上述问题,较大地减少了开发人员的工作量,为当前大型企业或单位后勤保障流程管理信息化提供了一个较高效的系统设计参考.     

An integration approach of hybrid databases based on SQL in cloud computing environment

As the applications with big data in cloud computing environment grow, many existing systems expect to expand their service to support the dramatic increase of data, and modern software development for services computing and cloud computing software systems is no longer based on a single database but on existing multidatabases and this convergence needs new software architecture design. This paper proposes an integration approach to support hybrid database architecture, including MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis, to make it possible of allowing users to query data simultaneously from both relational SQL systems and NoSQL systems in a single SQL query. Two mechanisms are provided for constructing Redis's indexes and semantic transforming between SQL and MongoDB API to add the SQL feature for these NoSQL databases. With the proposed approach, hybrid database systems can be performed in a flexible manner, ie, access can be either relational database or NoSQL, depending on the size of data. The approach can effectively reduce development complexity and improve development efficiency of the software systems with multidatabases. This is the result of further research on the related topic, which fills the gap ignored by relevant scholars in this field to make a little contribution to the further development of NoSQL technology.     

RELAX: a language to address uncertainty in self-adaptive systems requirement

Self-adaptive systems have the capability to autonomously modify their behavior at run-time in response to changes in their environment. Self-adaptation is particularly necessary for applications that must run continuously, even under adverse conditions and changing requirements; sample domains include automotive systems, telecommunications, and environmental monitoring systems. While a few techniques have been developed to support the monitoring and analysis of requirements for adaptive systems, limited attention has been paid to the actual creation and specification of requirements of self-adaptive systems. As a result, self-adaptivity is often constructed in an ad-hoc manner. In order to support the rigorous specification of adaptive systems requirements, this paper introduces RELAX, a new requirements language for self-adaptive systems that explicitly addresses uncertainty inherent in adaptive systems. We present the formal semantics for RELAX in terms of fuzzy logic, thus enabling a rigorous treatment of requirements that include uncertainty. RELAX enables developers to identify uncertainty in the requirements, thereby facilitating the design of systems that are, by definition, more flexible and amenable to adaptation in a systematic fashion. We illustrate the use of RELAX on smart home applications, including an adaptive assisted living system.     

A comparison of ‘traditional’ and multimedia information systems development practices

As multimedia information systems begin to infiltrate organizations, there arises a need to capture and disseminate knowledge about how to develop them. Little is thus far known about the realities of multimedia systems development practice, or about how the development of multimedia systems compares to that of ‘traditional’ information systems. Herein are discussed the findings of a survey of multimedia developers in Ireland. Practitioners generally agree that systematic approaches are desirable in order to beneficially add structure to development processes, but they are predominantly using their own in-house methods rather than those prescribed in the literature.     

Effects of stability on model composition effort: an exploratory study

Model composition plays a central role in many software engineering activities, e.g., evolving design models to add new features. To support these activities, developers usually rely on model composition heuristics. The problem is that the models to-be-composed usually conflict with each other in several ways and such composition heuristics might be unable to properly deal with all emerging conflicts. Hence, the composed model may bear some syntactic and semantic inconsistencies that should be resolved. As a result, the production of the intended model is an error-prone and effort-consuming task. It is often the case that developers end up examining all parts of the output composed model instead of prioritizing the most critical ones, i.e., those that are likely to be inconsistent with the intended model. Unfortunately, little is known about indicators that help developers (1) to identify which model is more likely to exhibit inconsistencies, and (2) to understand which composed models require more effort to be invested. It is often claimed that software systems remaining stable over time tends to have a lower number of defects and require less effort to be fixed than unstable systems. However, little is known about the effects of software stability in the context of model evolution when supported by composition heuristics. This paper, therefore, presents an exploratory study analyzing stability as an indicator of inconsistency rate and resolution effort on model composition activities. Our findings are derived from 180 compositions performed to evolve design models of three software product lines. Our initial results, supported by statistical tests, also indicate which types of changes led to lower inconsistency rate and lower resolution effort.     

Improving user experience with case-based reasoning systems using text mining and Web 2.0

Many CBR systems have been developed in the past. However, currently many CBR systems are facing a sustainability issue such as outdated cases and stagnant case growth. Some CBR systems have fallen into disuse due to the lack of new cases, case update, user participation and user engagement. To encourage the use of CBR systems and give users better experience, CBR system developers need to come up with new ways to add new features and values to the CBR systems. The author proposes a framework to use text mining and Web 2.0 technologies to improve and enhance CBR systems for providing better user experience. Two case studies were conducted to evaluate the usefulness of text mining techniques and Web 2.0 technologies for enhancing a large scale CBR system. The results suggest that text mining and Web 2.0 are promising ways to bring additional values to CBR and they should be incorporated into the CBR design and development process for the benefit of CBR users.     

Accelerating development with agent components

As the demand for more flexible, adaptable, extensible, and robust Web based enterprise application systems accelerates, adopting new software engineering methodologies and development strategies becomes critical. These strategies must support the construction of enterprise software systems that assemble highly flexible software components written at different times by various developers. Traditional software development strategies and engineering methodologies, which require development of software systems from scratch, fall short in this regard. Component based software engineering offers an attractive alternative for building Web based enterprise application systems. CBSE works by developing and evolving software from selected reusable software components, then assembling them within appropriate software architectures. By promoting the use of software components that commercial vendors or in-house developers build, the component based software development approach promises large scale software reuse     

Optimal decentralized control of large scale systems

This paper presents a new optimized decentralized controller design method for solving the tracking and disturbance rejection problems for large-scale linear time-invariant systems, using only low-order decentralized controllers. To illustrate the type of results which can be obtained using the new optimized decentralized control design method, the control of a large flexible space structure is studied and compared with the standard centralized LQR-observer controller. The order of the resultant decentralized controller is much smaller than that of the standard centralized LQR-observer controller. The proposed controller also has certain fail-safe properties and, in addition, it can be five orders of magnitude more robust than the standard LQR-observer controller based on their real stability radii. The new decentralized controller design method is applied to a large flexible space structure system with 5 inputs and 5 outputs and of order 24.     

实时系统设计模式的应用

介绍实时系统设计模式的概念及其应用实例,设计模式的目的是为了把成功的设计和体系结构总结出来,以便在今后的软件开发中重用。设计模式是通过对相关问题的分析而得到的,它描述了某一类问题及其解决方案。使用设计模式能得到已证实的成功设计,并把以往的设计经验以规范的形式记录下来。在电梯控制系统中应用设计模式,可以使设计更健壮、灵活和易于扩展。     

Systematic OO programming with axiomatic design

Axiomatic design offers a systematic and orderly way to proceed through the software development process. The methodology ensures that developers make the best possible design decisions by providing decision-making criteria in the form of two axioms: the independence axiom suggests that the best designs maintain the independence of the functional requirements, ensuring that the design can achieve each function without inadvertently affecting any other function; the information axiom suggests that the best designs minimize their information content. Thus, the solution with the greatest likelihood of success is the simplest solution. Software developers can determine the quality of the design based upon the degree to which it satisfies the defined functional requirements; ensure that the design satisfies each function independently and that coupling, which could cause unintended consequences, does not occur; enjoy easier job assignment and team management because they can use the system architecture diagram to assign tasks and define the interrelationships between various modules or classes; and handle software change orders quickly and easily because the system architecture identifies the modules affected by a change. Axiomatic design lets the developer document the design fully, making it easier to change or add extensions     

Refining code ownership with synchronous changes

When mining software repositories, two distinct sources of information are usually explored: the history log and snapshots of the system. Results of analyses derived from these two sources are biased by the frequency with which developers commit their changes. We argue that the usage of mainstream SCM (software configuration management) systems influences the way that developers work. For example, since it is tedious to resolve conflicts due to parallel commits, developers tend to minimize conflicts by not contemporarily modifying the same file. This however defeats one of the purposes of such systems. We mine repositories created by our tool Syde, which records changes in a central repository whenever a file is compiled locally in the IDE (integrated development environment) by any developer in a multi-developer project. This new source of information can augment the accuracy of analyses and breaks new ground in terms of how such information can assist developers. We illustrate how the information we mine provides a refined notion of code ownership with respect to the one inferred by SCM system data. We demonstrate our approach on three case studies, including an industrial one. Ownership models suffer from the assumption that developers have a perfect memory. To account for their imperfect memory, we integrate into our ownership measurement a model of memory retention, to simulate the effect of memory loss over time. We evaluate the characteristics of this model for several strengths of memory.     

Model-Driven Interactive System Design for Therapy Robots

Physiotherapy using intelligent robots is emerging as a new approach to recovery for many stroke patients. Although therapy robots have a strong potential in dealing with therapeutic and other medical applications, they have not been fully utilized in everyday therapy activities due to concerns over safety and the lack of friendly robot user/patient interaction models. From the viewpoint of software engineering, a user-centred design based on UML (Unified Modelling Language) has been known to be one of the best solutions to satisfy usability since the design process relies heavily on the analysis of users and their tasks to reach their goals. Therefore, a model-driven approach to interactive system design via UML for therapy robots is needed to make them usable in the real world. This paper proposes such approach and introduces a new graphical notation that describes user interface elements and the methods of connection with hardware/software objects. With the proposed abstract interaction models, prototyping interactive systems can be made faster and allows for their evaluation by users and system developers before implementation in order to improve usability from the perspectives of users and system developers.     

SOAW2 for Managing the Web 2.0 Framework

Web 2.0 predicates an improved and seamless user interaction and management of Web environment and resources, guaranteeing required services and a flexible generation of user applications. This occurs via an agile composition of services from available application (foundation) tools. Hence, Web 2.0 developers merely create the core of these applications, while the boundaries dynamically change and expand in accordance with user interaction (a use model). In other words, the resources, tools, and services act as plug-in entities that users can add or remove from the application's operational framework according to their needs. In this article we propose a service-oriented architecture, or SOA, model for managing the operation of Web 2.0 platform actors, improving the services provided to consumers