A Model Driven Approach based on Interaction Flow Modeling Language to Generate Rich Internet Applications

A Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) combine the simplicity of the hypertext paradigm with the flexibility of desktop interfaces. These appliations were proposed as a solution to follow the rapid growth and evolution of the Graphical User Interfaces. However, RIAs are complex applications and their development requires designing and implementation which are time-consuming and the available tools are specialized in manual design. In this paper, we present a model driven approach to generat GUI for Rich Internet Application. The approach exploits the new language IFML recently adopted by the Object Management Group. We used frameworks and technologies known to Model-Driven Engineering, such as Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) for Meta-modeling, Query View Transformation (QVT) for model transformations and Acceleo for code generation. The approach allows to quickly and efficiently generating a RIA focusing on the graphical aspect of the application

Auto-generation of rich Internet applications from visual mock-ups

Capturing and communicating software requirements accurately and quickly is a challenging activity. This needs expertise of people with unique skills. Traditionally this challenge has been compounded by assigning specialist roles for requirements gathering and analysis, design, and implementations. These multiple roles have resulted in information loss mainly due to miscommunication between requirement specialists, designers and implementers. Large enterprises have managed the information loss by using document centric approaches, leading to delays and cost escalations. But documentation centric and multiple role approaches are not suitable for Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) because they are vulnerable to market competitions. Moreover, SMEs require effective online applications to provide their service. Hence the motivation for carrying out this research is to explore the possibilities of empowering requirement specialists such as Business Analysts’ (BAs) to take on additional responsibilities of designers and implementers to generate web applications. In addition, SME owners and BAs can communicate better if they perceive the application requirements using a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) approach. Hence, this research explores the design and development of mock-up-based auto-generating tool to develop SME applications. A tool that auto-generates an application from a mock-up should have the capacity to extract the essential implementation details from the mock-up. Hence a visual mock-up language was created by extending existing research on meta-models of UIs for a class of popular modern web-based business applications called Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). The popularity of RIAs is due to their distinctive client-side processing power with desktop application like responsiveness and look and feel. The mock-ups drawn with the mock-up language should have sufficient level of details to auto-generate RIAs. To support this, the mock-up language includes constructs for specifying a RIA’s mock-up in terms of layouts and the widgets within them. In addition, the language uses annotations on the mock-up to specify the behaviour of the system. In such an approach the only additional effort required of a Business Analyst is to specify the requirements in terms of a mock-up of the expected interfaces of the SME application. Apart from the mock-up language, a tool was designed and developed to auto-generate the desired application from the mock-up. The tool is powered by algorithms to derive the database structure and the client-side and server-side components required for the auto-generated application. The validation of the mock-up language and auto-generating tool was performed by BAs to demonstrate its usability. The measurement and evaluation results indicate that the mock-up language and the auto-generator can be used successfully to help BAs in the development of SME application and thereby reduce delays, errors and cost overruns. The important contributions of this research are: (i) the design of a mock-up language that makes it easy to capture the structure and behaviour of SME web applications. (ii) algorithms for automatic derivation of the expected database schema from a visual mock-up. (iii) algorithms for automatic derivation of the client and server-side application logic. (iv) application of an existing measurement and evaluation process for the usability testing of the mock-up language and the auto-generated application. This research followed the Design Science Research (DSR) method for Information System to guide the IS design and to capture the knowledge created during the design process. DSR is a research method useful in solving wicked problems requiring innovative solutions for incomplete, contradictory or changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. This research opens new ways of thinking about web application development for future research. Specifically, mock-ups with few easy to understand annotations can be used as powerful active artifacts to capture the structure and behaviour of applications not just of small but also large enterprises. Auto-generating tools can then create fully functional and usable applications holistically from such mock-ups, thereby reducing delays and cost overruns during software engineering

MCloud

supervisor Dr. Abed El-Hamid ZougborStoring and sharing files is a task that all internet users do every day, in recent years the way people store their files is changed due the emergence of cloud storages services such as Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox, etc. They introduced a great solution for most users when it comes to storing files and sharing it with others. There are a ton of cloud storages options out there. Inevitably, everyone finds a favorite, but more than likely, a lot of users end up with a bunch of unused free storage from other services or the circumstances dictates them to use different cloud drives in case the user prefers Google Drive for example, but his work’s infrastructure uses Dropbox and his friends keep sharing files and photos using OneDrive. As a result the user begin to suffer from the same problem that was hoping to avoid from the first place, it became so frustrating to manage, store and share his files because it’s scattered in several storages and each one requires its own login. Duo to this, MCloud was born. MCloud is a web-based application essentially as cloud service that can put multiple cloud drives into one. It mainly serves for the users who have multiple cloud drives and in the need for managing all the files in their cloud drives through just one single account. MCloud users can connect their MCloud profile to other cloud storage services such as Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox. This connection allows the MCloud user to browse all files of these different drives in the same place without opening too many tabs or keeping longing in and out. Furthermore the team made sure that most functionalities that were available in the original cloud drives are also exists in MCloud system as well for instances the user can share files on social media and copy a sharable link to send it via email or a chat, also the major file management tools like creating, deleting and renaming files and folders are available, in addition to that the user also able to download and upload files easily. The team was dedicated to develop the system in the most fitted development practices with the available skills by using the ASP.NET MVC as the development framework with C# as programming language for our system following the incremental model with all the shear amount of advantages it offers. MCloud system is designed with a easy to use and user-friendly interface with responsive design technologies in order to give the user the ultimate solution for using cloud storage services

Survey of Technologies for Web Application Development

Web-based application developers face a dizzying array of platforms, languages, frameworks and technical artifacts to choose from. We survey, classify, and compare technologies supporting Web application development. The classification is based on (1) foundational technologies; (2)integration with other information sources; and (3) dynamic content generation. We further survey and classify software engineering techniques and tools that have been adopted from traditional programming into Web programming. We conclude that, although the infrastructure problems of the Web have largely been solved, the cacophony of technologies for Web-based applications reflects the lack of a solid model tailored for this domain.Comment: 43 page

Developing BP-driven web application through the use of MDE techniques

Model driven engineering (MDE) is a suitable approach for performing the construction of software systems (in particular in the Web application domain). There are different types of Web applications depending on their purpose (i.e., document-centric, interactive, transactional, workflow/business process-based, collaborative, etc). This work focusses on business process-based Web applications in order to be able to understand business processes in a broad sense, from the lightweight business processes already addressed by existing proposals to long-running asynchronous processes. This work presents a MDE method for the construction of systems of this type. The method has been designed in two steps following the MDE principles. In the first step, the system is represented by means of models in a technology-independent manner. These models capture the different aspects of Web-based systems (these aspects refer to behaviour, structure, navigation, and presentation issues). In the second step, the model transformations (both model-to- model and model-to-text) are applied in order to obtain the final system in terms of a specific technology. In addition, a set ofEclipse-based tools has been developed to provide automation in the application of the proposed method in order to validate the proposal.Torres Bosch, MV.; Giner Blasco, P.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2012). Developing BP-driven web application through the use of MDE techniques. Software and Systems Modeling. 11(4):609-631. doi:10.1007/s10270-010-0177-5S609631114Andrews, T., Curbera, F., Dholakia, H., Goland, Y., Klein, J., Leymann, F., Liu, K., Roller, D., Smith, D., Thatte, S., Trickovic, I., Weerawarana, S.: Business process execution language for Web services version 1.1 (May 2003)Barna, P., Frasincar, F., Houben, G.J.: A workow-driven design of Web information systems. In: Wolber, D., Calder, N., Brooks, C., Ginige, A. (eds.) ICWE, ACM, pp. 321–328Bakshi, K., Karger, D.R.: Semantic Web applications. In: Proceedings of the ISWC 2005 Workshop on End User Semantic Web Interaction (November 2005)Brambilla M., Ceri S., Fraternali P., Manolescu I.: Process modeling in Web applications. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 15(4), 360–409 (2006)Brambilla, M., Preciado, J.C., Trigueros, M.L., Sánchez-Figueroa F.: Business process-based conceptual design of rich internet applications. In: ICWE, pp. 155–161 (2008)Brambilla, M., Butti, S., Fraternali, P.: Webratio bpm: a tool for designing and deploying business processes on the Web. In: ICWE, pp. 415–429 (2010)Business process modeling notation (BPMN). OMG final adopted specification. dtc/06-02-01 (February 2006)Ceri, S., Fraternali, P., Bongio, A.: Web modeling language (Webml): a modeling language for designing Web sites. In: Proceedings of the 9th international World Wide Web conference on Computer networks : the international journal of computer and telecommunications networking, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp. 137–157. North-Holland Publishing Co., The Netherlands (2000)Davis J.: Open Source SOA. Manning Publications Co, Greenwich (2009)Distante, D.: Reengineering legacy applications and Web transactions: an extended version of the UWA transaction design model. Ph.D. thesis, University of Lecce, Italy (2004)Distante D., Rossi G., Canfora G., Tilley S.R.: A comprehensive design model for integrating business processes in Web applications. Int. J. Web Eng. Technol. 3(1), 43–72 (2007)Duhl, J.: Rich internet applications. Technical report, IDC (November 2003)Fons, J.: OOWS: A model driven method for the development of web applications. Ph.D. thesis, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (2008)Fons, J., Pelechano, V., Pastor, O., Valderas, P., Torres, V.: Applying the OOWS model-driven approach for developing web applications. The internet movie database case study. In: Web Engineering: Modelling and Implementing Web Applications. Human–Computer Interaction Series, pp. 65–108. Springer, London (2008)Fowler, M.: Inversion of control containers and the dependency injection pattern. http://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html (January 2004)Gershenfeld N., Krikorian R., Cohen D.: The internet of things. Sci Am 291(4), 76–81 (2004)Giner P., Cetina C., Fons J., Pelechano V.: Developing mobile business processes for the internet of things. IEEE Pervasive Comput. 9, 18–26 (2010)Gómez J., Cachero C., Pastor O.: Extending a conceptual modelling approach to Web application design. In: Wangler, B., Bergman, L. (eds) CAiSE. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1789, pp. 79–93. Springer, London (2000)Goth G.: The task-based interface: not your father’s desktop. IEEE Software 26(6), 88–91 (2009)Holmes, T., Tran, H., Zdun, U., Dustdar, S.: Modeling human aspects of business processes—a view-based, model-driven approach. In: ECMDA-FA, pp. 246–261 (2008)Kappel, G., Pröll, B., Reich, S., Retschitzegger, W. (eds): Web Engineering—The Discipline of Systematic Development of Web Applications. Wiley, England (2006)Koch, N.: Software Engineering for Adaptive Hypermedia Systems: Reference Model, Modeling Techniques and Development Process. Ph.D. thesis, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany (2001)Koch N., Kraus A., Cachero C., Meliá S.: Integration of business processes in Web application models. J. Web Eng. 3(1), 22–49 (2004)Limbourg, Q., Vanderdonckt, J.: Usixml: a user interface description language supporting multiple levels of independence. In: ICWE Workshops, pp. 325–338 (2004)Linaje M., Preciado J.C., Sánchez-Figueroa F.: Engineering rich internet application user interfaces over legacy Web models. IEEE Internet Comput. 11(6), 53–59 (2007)Link, S., Hoyer, P., Schuster, T., Abeck, S.: Model-driven development of human tasks for workflows. In: ICSEA ‘08: Proceedings of the 2008 third international conference on software engineering advances, Washington, DC, USA, pp. 329–335. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2008)Marcos, E., Cáceres, P., Castro, V. D.: An approach for navigation model construction from the use cases model. In: CAiSE Forum. Held in conjunction with the 16th Conference On Advanced Information Systems Engineering (June 2004)Pietschmann, S., Voigt, M., Meissner, K.: Adaptive rich user interfaces for human interaction in business processes. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE 2009), WISE, pp. 351–364. 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In: MoDELS, pp. 226–240 (2007)Tedre M.: What should be automated?. Interactions 15(5), 47–49 (2008)Torres, V., Giner, P., Bonet, B., Pelechano, V.: Adapting BPMN to Public Administration. In: Proceedings BPMN 2010 Springer’s Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP). Postdam, Germany (to appear)Troyer, O.D., Casteleyn, S.: Modeling complex processes for Web applications using wsdm. In: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Web-Oriented Software Technologies (held in conjunction with ICWE2003), IWWOST2003 (2003

WARP : speeding up the software development process

Estágio realizado na Qimonda Portugal, S. ATese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informátca e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

A Domain Specific Graphical User Interface Framework

Since the early days of software development, there has been an ongoing trend towards higher-order or higher level abstractions in programming languages, software libraries and application frameworks. Some of the arguments for software development tools with higher levels of abstraction include simpler software development, improved portability and better maintainability. Higher level abstractions can however lead to reduced performance. This thesis presents an innovative graphical user interface software solution that mixes high-level and low-level approaches to achieve acceptable performance while retaining good maintainability. The solution is an extension to a graphical application framework called JavaFX. The scope of this thesis is defined by a software development project which goal is to create a graphical user interface framework. The framework is used in the creation of customer specific user interfaces for an accompanying intralogistics system. The resulting user interfaces must be able to visualize possibly thousands of objects moving on a factory floor. The views must simultaneously support user-initiated zooming, panning, and tilting of the two-dimensional view. Meeting these requirements while maintaining acceptable performance, requires an unconventional solution and a deviation from idiomatic JavaFX. The user interface framework in question is developed using a high-level graphical user interface application framework called JavaFX. JavaFX is the most recent graphical user interface toolkit included in the official Java Development Kit. It has many reactive traits and other modern high-level properties. Overcoming performance challenges with JavaFX when producing views with thousands of animated items was the key research challenge in this research. Some attention is also given to replacing JavaFX built-in dependency injection system with Spring framework to improve JavaFX suitability to the task at hand. This thesis presents a hybrid solution that overcomes JavaFX’s performance challenges in the problem domain, while retaining as much as possible of the usefulness of the high-level features present in the JavaFX framework. The key innovation is a mechanism that enables automated rendering of sprite-bitmaps from JavaFX scene-graph nodes. The solution includes a system that draws the automatically generated bitmaps to a lower-level JavaFX component called Canvas. The solution enables layered mixing of regular JavaFX views with the custom high-performance views, including seamless resizing and event handling between the two types of views. The solution enables the developers of customer specific user interfaces to choose an appropriate graphics rendering type, such that only objects that cause performance issues, typically items which number exceeds dozens, need to use the more complex high-performance system

Operations research modeling environment for an ERP system

Estágio realizado na AlumniEI e Microsoft Development Center CopenhagenTese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200