Architectural Modifiability Considerations for Designing a Multi-device Web Application Platform

AbstractThe mobile web has enabled applications to become available anywhere, anytime and on any device. Numerous emerg- ing web applications have the ability to execute and collaborate across a wide range of web-enabled devices. However, due to the increasing variety of target delivery contexts, the development of such mobile applications has led to a strong need for adaptive software engineering. To address this significant issue, webinos was designed. Webinos is a multi-device distributed platform for ubiquitous web-based applications. In this paper we discuss the architectural modifiability tactics and patterns that were considered for the design of the webinos platform. Moreover, we reflect on the implementation details of realizing such a modifiable architectural design

Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations

The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments

Analysing the Design of Privacy-Preserving Data-Sharing Architecture

Privacy has become an essential software quality to consider in a software system. Privacy practices should be adopted from the early stages of the system design to safeguard personal data from privacy violations. Privacy patterns are proposed in industry and academia as reusable design solutions to address different privacy issues. However, the diverse types and granularity of the patterns lead to difficulty for the practitioner to select and adopt them in the architecture. First, the fragmented information about the system actors in the patterns does not align with the regulatory entities and interactions between them. Second, these privacy patterns lack architectural perspectives that could help weave patterns into concrete software designs. Third, the consequences of applying the patterns have not covered the impacts on software quality attributes. This thesis aims to provide guidance to software architects and practitioners for considering and applying privacy patterns in their design, by adding new perspectives to the existing patterns. First, the research provides an analysis of the relationships between regulatory entities and their responsibility in adopting the patterns in a software design. Then, the research reports studies that were conducted using architectural-level modelling-based approaches, to analyse the architectural views of privacy patterns. The analyses aim to improve understanding of how privacy patterns are applied in software designs and how such a design affects software quality attributes, including privacy, performance, and modifiability. Finally, in an effort to harmonise and unite the extended view of privacy patterns that have a close relation to system architecture, this research proposes an enhanced pattern catalogue and a systematic privacy-by-design (PbD) pattern-selection model that aims to aid and guide software architects in pattern selection during software design. The enhanced pattern catalogue offers consolidated information on the extended view of privacy patterns. The selection model provides a structured way for the practitioner to know when and how to use the pattern catalogue in the system-design process. Two industry case studies are used to evaluate the proposed pattern catalogue and selection model. The findings demonstrate how the proposed frameworks are applicable to different types of data-sharing software systems and their usability in supporting pattern selection decisions in the privacy design

Feature-based generation of pervasive systems architectures utilizing software product line concepts

As the need for pervasive systems tends to increase and to dominate the computing discipline, software engineering approaches must evolve at a similar pace to facilitate the construction of such systems in an efficient manner. In this thesis, we provide a vision of a framework that will help in the construction of software product lines for pervasive systems by devising an approach to automatically generate architectures for this domain. Using this framework, designers of pervasive systems will be able to select a set of desired system features, and the framework will automatically generate architectures that support the presence of these features. Our approach will not compromise the quality of the architecture especially as we have verified that by comparing the generated architectures to those manually designed by human architects. As an initial step, and in order to determine the most commonly required features that comprise the widely most known pervasive systems, we surveyed more than fifty existing architectures for pervasive systems in various domains. We captured the most essential features along with the commonalities and variabilities between them. The features were categorized according to the domain and the environment that they target. Those categories are: General pervasive systems, domain-specific, privacy, bridging, fault-tolerance and context-awareness. We coupled the identified features with well-designed components, and connected the components based on the initial features selected by a system designer to generate an architecture. We evaluated our generated architectures against architectures designed by human architects. When metrics such as coupling, cohesion, complexity, reusability, adaptability, modularity, modifiability, packing density, and average interaction density were used to test our framework, our generated architectures were found comparable, if not better than the human generated architectures

Architectural Tactics for Energy Efficiency: Review of the Literature and Research Roadmap

The energy consequences of software are rapidly growing: at the high-end, server farms consume enormous amounts of energy; at the low-end there is ever-increasing emphasis on battery-powered mobile and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices with equally increasing complex usage scenarios. Conversely, there has been little attention to how software architectures can be designed for energy efficiency. While other software qualities—--think of performance or availability--—have been extensively studied, there is little research on how to reason about energy-consumption as a first-class citizen. We provide a basis for reasoning about design decisions for energy efficiency by deriving a kit of reusable architectural tactics derived from literature. We use the well-known open-search and snowballing methodologies to attain primary studies, and subsequently used thematic coding of such studies to identify recurrences and commonalities among the design strategies presented. The result of this process is a set of 10 architectural tactics for energy efficiency. These tactics provide a rational basis for architectural design and analysis for energy efficiency

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