Quality-aware model-driven service engineering

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Quality aspects ranging from interoperability to maintainability to performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Architecture models can substantially influence quality attributes of the implemented software systems. Besides the benefits of explicit architectures on maintainability and reuse, architectural constraints such as styles, reference architectures and architectural patterns can influence observable software properties such as performance. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and evaluating the performance of implemented software. We present an approach for addressing the quality of services and service-based systems at the model-level in the context of model-driven service engineering. The focus on architecture-level models is a consequence of the black-box character of services

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

The role of concurrency in an evolutionary view of programming abstractions

In this paper we examine how concurrency has been embodied in mainstream programming languages. In particular, we rely on the evolutionary talking borrowed from biology to discuss major historical landmarks and crucial concepts that shaped the development of programming languages. We examine the general development process, occasionally deepening into some language, trying to uncover evolutionary lineages related to specific programming traits. We mainly focus on concurrency, discussing the different abstraction levels involved in present-day concurrent programming and emphasizing the fact that they correspond to different levels of explanation. We then comment on the role of theoretical research on the quest for suitable programming abstractions, recalling the importance of changing the working framework and the way of looking every so often. This paper is not meant to be a survey of modern mainstream programming languages: it would be very incomplete in that sense. It aims instead at pointing out a number of remarks and connect them under an evolutionary perspective, in order to grasp a unifying, but not simplistic, view of the programming languages development process

Multi-Party Coordination in the Context of MOWS

Separation of concerns has been presented as a promising tool to tackle the design of complex systems in which cross-cutting properties that do not fit into the scope of a class must be satisfied. In this paper, we show that interactions amongst a number of objects can also be described separately from functionality, which enhances reusability of functional code and interaction patterns. We present our proposal in the context of Multi-Qrganisational Web-Based Systems (MOWS) and also present a framework that provides the infrastructure needed to implement multiparty coordination as an independent aspect