Declarative Ajax Web Applications through SQL++ on a Unified Application State

Implementing even a conceptually simple web application requires an inordinate amount of time. FORWARD addresses three problems that reduce developer productivity: (a) Impedance mismatch across the multiple languages used at different tiers of the application architecture. (b) Distributed data access across the multiple data sources of the application (SQL database, user input of the browser page, session data in the application server, etc). (c) Asynchronous, incremental modification of the pages, as performed by Ajax actions. FORWARD belongs to a novel family of web application frameworks that attack impedance mismatch by offering a single unifying language. FORWARD's language is SQL++, a minimally extended SQL. FORWARD's architecture is based on two novel cornerstones: (a) A Unified Application State (UAS), which is a virtual database over the multiple data sources. The UAS is accessed via distributed SQL++ queries, therefore resolving the distributed data access problem. (b) Declarative page specifications, which treat the data displayed by pages as rendered SQL++ page queries. The resulting pages are automatically incrementally modified by FORWARD. User input on the page becomes part of the UAS. We show that SQL++ captures the semi-structured nature of web pages and subsumes the data models of two important data sources of the UAS: SQL databases and JavaScript components. We show that simple markup is sufficient for creating Ajax displays and for modeling user input on the page as UAS data sources. Finally, we discuss the page specification syntax and semantics that are needed in order to avoid race conditions and conflicts between the user input and the automated Ajax page modifications. FORWARD has been used in the development of eight commercial and academic applications. An alpha-release web-based IDE (itself built in FORWARD) enables development in the cloud.Comment: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Database Programming Languages (DBPL 2013), August 30, 2013, Riva del Garda, Trento, Ital

Reverse Engineering and Testing of Rich Internet Applications

The World Wide Web experiences a continuous and constant evolution, where new initiatives, standards, approaches and technologies are continuously proposed for developing more effective and higher quality Web applications. To satisfy the growing request of the market for Web applications, new technologies, frameworks, tools and environments that allow to develop Web and mobile applications with the least effort and in very short time have been introduced in the last years. These new technologies have made possible the dawn of a new generation of Web applications, named Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), that offer greater usability and interactivity than traditional ones. This evolution has been accompanied by some drawbacks that are mostly due to the lack of applying well-known software engineering practices and approaches. As a consequence, new research questions and challenges have emerged in the field of web and mobile applications maintenance and testing. The research activity described in this thesis has addressed some of these topics with the specific aim of proposing new and effective solutions to the problems of modelling, reverse engineering, comprehending, re-documenting and testing existing RIAs. Due to the growing relevance of mobile applications in the renewed Web scenarios, the problem of testing mobile applications developed for the Android operating system has been addressed too, in an attempt of exploring and proposing new techniques of testing automation for these type of applications

On porting software visualization tools to the web

Software systems are hard to understand due to the complexity and the sheer size of the data to be analyzed. Software visualization tools are a great help as they can sum up large quantities of data in dense, meaningful pictures. Traditionally, such tools come in the form of desktop applications. Modern web frameworks are about to change this status quo, as building software visualization tools as web applications can help in making them available to a larger audience in a collaborative setting. Such a migration comes with a number of promises, perils, and technical implications that must be considered before starting any migration process. In this paper, we share our experiences in porting two such tools to the web and provide guidelines about the porting. In particular, we discuss promises and perils that go hand in hand with such an endeavor and present a number of technological alternatives that are available to implement web-based visualization

Distributed and Collaborative Software Evolution Analysis with Churrasco

AbstractAnalyzing the evolution of large and long-lived software systems is a complex problem that requires extensive tool support due to the amount and complexity of the data that needs to be processed. In this paper, we present Churrasco, a tool to support collaborative software evolution analysis through a web interface. After describing the tool and its architecture, we provide a usage scenario of Churrasco on a large open source software system, and we present two collaboration experiments performed with, respectively, 8 and 4 participants

PERFORMANCE BASED PRICING MODELS IN ONLINE ADVERTISING: CLICK PER MILLE (CPM) AND COST PER CLICK (CPC)

The project is focusing on enhancing pricing scheme for Publishers on online advertising method thru Click Per Mille (CPM) and Cost Per Click (CPC). Both have strength and weakness that might affect profitability / revenue on the Publishers side. Dengler, Brian. (2011) state that Internet advertising revenues jumped 23 percent in the United State for the first quarter of 2011 over the same period last year, according to figures released May 27, 2011 by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). In the other words, online advertising is the best way to making money for the player within the industry; Publishers and Advertisers. From the Malaysian perspectives, in order to the players in the online advertising industry is following the guidelines and code of practices, they must referring and dealing with Advertising Standards Authority Malaysia who provide Malaysian Code of Advertising Practice. The Advertising Standards Authority Malaysia (ASA) is the independent body responsible for ensuring that the self-regulatory system works in the public interest. The ASA’s activities include investigating complaints and copy advice on your advertising. The Malaysian Code of Advertising Practice has the support of the following organizations whose representatives constitute the Advertising Standards Authority Malaysia. The Malaysian Code of Advertising Practice has the support of the following organizations whose representatives constitute the Advertising Standards Authority Malaysia; Association of Accredited Advertising Agents Malaysia, Malaysian Advertisers Association, Malaysian Newspaper Publishers Association, and Media Specialists Association. Yuan, S., Abidin, A.Z., Sloan, M., and Wang, J. (2012) state that towards this goal mathematically well grounded Computational Advertising methods are becoming necessary and will continue to develop as a fundamental tool towards the Web. As a vibrant new discipline, Internet advertising requires effort from different research domains including Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Data Mining and Analytic, Statistics, Economics, and even Psychology to predict and understand user vi behaviors. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on Internet advertising, discussing and classifying the research issues, identifying the recent technologies, and suggesting its future directions. To have a comprehensive picture, we start with a brief history, introduction, and classification of the industry and present a schematic view of the new advertising ecosystem. We then introduce four major participants, namely advertisers, online publishers, ad exchanges and web users; and through analyzing and discussing the major research problems and existing solutions from their perspectives respectively, we discover and aggregate the fundamental problems that characterize the newly formed researched and capture its potential future prospects. Performance based advertising is a form of advertising in which the purchaser pays only when there are measurable results. Performance based advertising is becoming more common with the spread of electronic media, notably the Internet, where it is possible to measure user actions resulting from advertisement. Publishers act as the body who will appoint another body (Advertisers) to advertise their products and services to the publics. However, there still inefficiency between Click Per Mille (CPM) and Cost Per Click (CPC). This project will do research, analyze, evaluate, calculate, enhance and develop current advertising approach for a better performance based pricing models. As the result, the new improvised pricing model where as CPM, CPC or combination of both (Hybrid) might contribute much to the small business and entrepreneurship player’s in Malaysia especially to the Bumiputra’s. The advanced and effective pricing model will help much to them in order to promote and increased the amount of business revenue by applying and practicing the new pricing model on online advertising. The collaboration between Publishers and Advertisers also important to make sure the direct negotiation is realized between them (No more agents) so the win - win situation could be the objective of the pricing model project

Managing State for Ajax-Driven Web Components

Abstract Ajax-driven Web applications require state to be maintained across a series of server requests related to a single Web page. This conflicts with the stateless approach used in most Web servers and makes it difficult to create modular components that use Ajax. We implemented and evaluated two approaches to managing component state: one, called reminders, stores the state on the browser, and another, called page properties, stores the state on the server. Both of these approaches enable modular Ajax-driven components but they both introduce overhead for managing the state; in addition the reminder approach creates security issues and the page property approach introduces storage reclamation problems. Because of the subtlety and severity of the security issues with the reminder approach, we argue that it is better to store Ajax state on the server

Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation

Students, researchers and professional analysts lack effective tools to make personal and collective sense of problems while working in distributed teams. Central to this work is the process of sharing–and contesting–interpretations via different forms of argument. How does the 'Web 2.0' paradigm challenge us to deliver useful, usable tools for online argumentation? This paper reviews the current state of the art in Web Argumentation, describes key features of the Web 2.0 orientation, and identifies some of the tensions that must be negotiated in bringing these worlds together. It then describes how these design principles are interpreted in Cohere, a web tool for social bookmarking, idea-linking, and argument visualization

Automating data aggregation for collaborative filtering in Ruby on Rails

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 59).Collaborative filtering and information filtering are tried and proven methods of utilizing aggregated data about a website's users to provide catered content. Passive filters are one subset of such algorithms that utilize data about a user's interactions with a website in viewing content, purchasing items, etc. My work develops a set of extensions for Ruby on Rails that, when inserted into an existing application, will comprehensively log information associated with different types of user interactions to provide a sound base for many passive filter implementations. The extensions will log how users interact with the application server (content accessed, forms submitted, etc) as well as how users interact with that content on their own browser (scrolling, AJAX requests, JavaScript calls, etc). Given existing open-source collaborative filtering algorithms, the ability to automatically aggregate user-interaction data in any arbitrary Rails application significantly decreases the barrier to implementing passive filtering in an already efficient agile web development framework. Further, my work utilizes the logged data to implement a web interface to view analytic information about the components of an application.by Daniel R. Malconian.M.Eng

Exploiting Personal Web Servers for Mobile Context-Aware Applications

There is an increasing trend in moving desktop applications to web browsers, even when the web server is running on the same desktop machine. In this paper we go further in this direction and show how to combine a web server, a web application framework (enhanced to support desktop-like Model-View-Controller interaction) and a context-aware architecture to develop web based mobile context-aware applications. By using this approach we take advantage of the well established web paradigm to design the GUIs and the inherent ability of the web to mash up applications with external components (such as Google Maps). On top of that, since the web server runs on the device itself, the application can access local resources (such as disk space or sensing devices, which are indispensable for context-aware systems) avoiding the sandbox model of the web browsers. To illustrate our approach we show how a mobile hypermedia system has been built on top of our platform.Facultad de InformáticaLaboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada (LIFIA

Rendering real-time dashboards using a GraphQL-based UI Architecture

With the increase in the complexity of the systems being built and demand in the quality of service by the customers, developing and providing highly efficient real-time systems is one of the biggest challenges today for software enterprises. BluemixTM ─ IBM’s cloud offering implemented on Cloud Foundry, an open source “Platform as a Service” (PaaS), is an example of such a system. Currently, there are approx. 26 infrastructural services running in the background from where the data is fetched and is rendered on different dashboards of the system. However, the system suffers from performance issues. This thesis explores the performance improvements of the real-time dashboards by introducing our proposed GraphQL-based UI architecture which allows caching and asynchronous loading. The test results of this architecture’s implementation on the Bluemix Usage Dashboard show that the Real data renders 245% faster and the Switching Account 153% faster than the existing system