\u27Do It Yourself (DIY)\u27 E-Business Solutions for Small and Medium Enterprises

The potential benefits and cost of adopting and implementing e-business solutions are both high. They are major attraction and concern for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) respectively. If a right tradeoff point is not balanced between the two, a breakthrough progress is unlikely to become true. This paper addresses this very issue by proposing and developing a new approach based on the concept of “portalets” that are used as building blocks to develop e-business solutions with no or varying degree of customization efforts. Portalets are designed following the platform for deriving the software product lines. This “Do It Yourself (DI)” approach significantly reduces the time and effort to an affordable level while capturing the unique business logics into the solutions. In this paper, the necessity, feasibility, and the challenging issues of the proposed DIY e-business approach will be discussed. Case studies will be presented to demonstrate the approach and directions for further work

A lightweight XML-based middleware architecture

Predefined components often require adaption to make them work together including an adaption of the data exchanged. The present paper describes an XML based approach to solve the adoption of data. It includes the serialization of objets to XML, the transformation with XSLT, and the parsing and construction of the transformed objects. The pre-agreed document types involved allow a pre-compilation of the processes. Compared to standard interpreted XML processing, this approach reduces the online adaptation processes and speeds up the components\u27 communication

Component communication and data adaptation

Predefined components often require adaption to interoperate, especially an adaption of the data they exchange. This paper presents an XML-based approach to the data adaption problem. It covers serialization of objects to XML, their transformation with XSLT, as well as deserialization, i.e., parsing and reconstruction of the transformed objects. We statically analyze classes to generate specific document types and allow static preprocessing. Compared to normal interpreted XML processing, this approach eliminates introspection overhead, thus accelerating the components communication

Exploiting similarity patterns in web applications for enhanced genericity and maintainability

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH