A Methodology for Engineering Collaborative and ad-hoc Mobile Applications using SyD Middleware

Today’s web applications are more collaborative and utilize standard and ubiquitous Internet protocols. We have earlier developed System on Mobile Devices (SyD) middleware to rapidly develop and deploy collaborative applications over heterogeneous and possibly mobile devices hosting web objects. In this paper, we present the software engineering methodology for developing SyD-enabled web applications and illustrate it through a case study on two representative applications: (i) a calendar of meeting application, which is a collaborative application and (ii) a travel application which is an ad-hoc collaborative application. SyD-enabled web objects allow us to create a collaborative application rapidly with limited coding effort. In this case study, the modular software architecture allowed us to hide the inherent heterogeneity among devices, data stores, and networks by presenting a uniform and persistent object view of mobile objects interacting through XML/SOAP requests and responses. The performance results we obtained show that the application scales well as we increase the group size and adapts well within the constraints of mobile devices

Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

Don't Repeat Yourself: Seamless Execution and Analysis of Extensive Network Experiments

This paper presents MACI, the first bespoke framework for the management, the scalable execution, and the interactive analysis of a large number of network experiments. Driven by the desire to avoid repetitive implementation of just a few scripts for the execution and analysis of experiments, MACI emerged as a generic framework for network experiments that significantly increases efficiency and ensures reproducibility. To this end, MACI incorporates and integrates established simulators and analysis tools to foster rapid but systematic network experiments. We found MACI indispensable in all phases of the research and development process of various communication systems, such as i) an extensive DASH video streaming study, ii) the systematic development and improvement of Multipath TCP schedulers, and iii) research on a distributed topology graph pattern matching algorithm. With this work, we make MACI publicly available to the research community to advance efficient and reproducible network experiments