Programmation par les utilisateurs finaux : Composition d'applications Web respectueuse de la vie privée

International audienceFacebook, Gmail and Dropbox are only three examples of successful web applications. Each of them provides specif ic functionalities and application composition allows user to extend the range of functionalities they can benefit from. However, they rely on mediation code produced by expert developers. As a result, end users cannot freely compose web applications. They cannot precisely configure their privacy preferences either. These two constrains impair users experience. Our work seeks to deal with this lacks. We propose a model-driven approach which permits end users to specify the composition of their web applicati ons and their privacy preferences. Our approach allows to generate the execution code so that end users do not have to rely on developers. Our work is implemented as a modeling and execution tool. We use our tool to realiz e a real - world compositio

Risks of user-development application in small business

This paper discusses the risks of developing computerised business applications by end-users particularly in the small business environment. As today’s end-users are becoming more and more sophisticated, coupled with the proliferation of Information Technology (IT) that has brought the computerisation of business activities within reach of many small firms, understanding the benefits and risks of user-developed applications would contribute towards the small firm’s effectiveness in IT adoption. This is particularly relevant in today’s managing business where businesses, including the small firms, in a volatile environment will have to compete not only locally but also globally,and IT is seen to be an enabler that can help small firms to increase their competitiveness. Relevant literature on the benefits and risks of user-developed applications were sought and summarised in this paper. Findings were also based on a case study investigation of small firms with no formal IT function where observations were made on the end-user developers who were given the responsibility to develop the firm’s computerised applications. Whilst the benefits have been enormously highlighted and at times overshadowed the risks, due attention is given to examining the risks so as to provide a more balanced report and a precautionary measure for end-user developers. Risks were categorised according to organisational and individual risks following the application development stages of planning, analysis, design and implementation

A Tool Suite to Enable Web Designers, Web Application Developers and End-users to Handle Semantic Data

Current web application development requires highly qualified staff, dealing with an extensive number of architectures and technologies. When these applications incorporate semantic data, the list of skill requirements becomes even larger, leading to a high adoption barrier for the development of semantically enabled Web applications. This paper describes VPOET, a tool focused mainly on two types of users: web designers and web application developers. By using this tool, web designers do not need specific skills in semantic web technologies to create web templates to handle semantic data. Web application developers incorporate those templates into their web applications, by means of a simple mechanism based in HTTP messages. End-users can use these templates through a Google Gadget. As web designers play a key role in the system, an experimental evaluation has been conducted, showing that VPOET provides good usability features for a representative group of web designers in a wide range of competencies in client-side technologies, ranging from amateur HTML developers to professional web designers

Indentifying Success Factors for Developing Web Applications: A Research Report

A survey for success factors of Web application development reveals that development methodologies, tools, and techniques are not considered as important by developers for the success of Web application development. Rapid application prototyping, ERD (entity relationship diagram), program flowchart, and application framework are more highly regarded than the object-oriented tools such as use case diagram, class diagram, object diagram, and sequence diagram. Developers focus more on maintainability and scalability than end users and management for evaluating the success of Web application development. Ambiguous user requirements, scope creeping, and lack of success metrics are evaluated as the most important issues for the failure of Web application development. Research results also indicate that developers need more help in communication, management, and control than the technology aspects of the development process. The overall findings point to flexible, simple, proven, participative, and management-oriented methodologies, tools, and techniques to address ambiguous and changing user requirements in the next generation development approaches for Web applications

Intents-based Service Discovery and Integration

With the proliferation of Web services, when developing a new application, it makes sense to seek and leverage existing Web services rather than implementing the corresponding components from scratch. Therefore, significant research efforts have been devoted to the techniques for service discovery and integration. However, most of the existing techniques are based on the ternary participant classification of the Web service architecture which only takes into consideration the involvement of service providers, service brokers, and application developers. The activities of application end users are usually ignored. This thesis presents an Intents-based service discovery and integration approach at the conceptual level inspired by two industrial protocols: Android Intents and Web Intents. The proposed approach is characterized by allowing application end users to participate in the process of service seeking. Instead of directly binding with remote services, application developers can set an intent which semantically represents their service goal. An Intents user agent can resolve the intent and generate a list of candidate services. Then application end users can choose a service as the ultimate working service. This thesis classifies intents into explicit intents, authoritative intents, and naïve intents, and examines in depth the issue of naïve intent resolution analytically and empirically. Based on the empirical analysis, an adaptive intent resolution approach is devised. This thesis also presents a design for the Intents user agent and demonstrates its proof-of-concept prototype. Finally, Intents and the Intents user agent are applied to integrate Web applications and native applications on mobile devices

Security Evaluation of Cyber-Physical Systems in Society- Critical Internet of Things

In this paper, we present evaluation of security awareness of developers and users of cyber-physical systems. Our study includes interviews, workshops, surveys and one practical evaluation. We conducted 15 interviews and conducted survey with 55 respondents coming primarily from industry. Furthermore, we performed practical evaluation of current state of practice for a society-critical application, a commercial vehicle, and reconfirmed our findings discussing an attack vector for an off-line societycritical facility. More work is necessary to increase usage of security strategies, available methods, processes and standards. The security information, currently often insufficient, should be provided in the user manuals of products and services to protect system users. We confirmed it lately when we conducted an additional survey of users, with users feeling as left out in their quest for own security and privacy. Finally, hardware-related security questions begin to come up on the agenda, with a general increase of interest and awareness of hardware contribution to the overall cyber-physical security. At the end of this paper we discuss possible countermeasures for dealing with threats in infrastructures, highlighting the role of authorities in this quest

Serverification of Molecular Modeling Applications: the Rosetta Online Server that Includes Everyone (ROSIE)

The Rosetta molecular modeling software package provides experimentally tested and rapidly evolving tools for the 3D structure prediction and high-resolution design of proteins, nucleic acids, and a growing number of non-natural polymers. Despite its free availability to academic users and improving documentation, use of Rosetta has largely remained confined to developers and their immediate collaborators due to the code's difficulty of use, the requirement for large computational resources, and the unavailability of servers for most of the Rosetta applications. Here, we present a unified web framework for Rosetta applications called ROSIE (Rosetta Online Server that Includes Everyone). ROSIE provides (a) a common user interface for Rosetta protocols, (b) a stable application programming interface for developers to add additional protocols, (c) a flexible back-end to allow leveraging of computer cluster resources shared by RosettaCommons member institutions, and (d) centralized administration by the RosettaCommons to ensure continuous maintenance. This paper describes the ROSIE server infrastructure, a step-by-step 'serverification' protocol for use by Rosetta developers, and the deployment of the first nine ROSIE applications by six separate developer teams: Docking, RNA de novo, ERRASER, Antibody, Sequence Tolerance, Supercharge, Beta peptide design, NCBB design, and VIP redesign. As illustrated by the number and diversity of these applications, ROSIE offers a general and speedy paradigm for serverification of Rosetta applications that incurs negligible cost to developers and lowers barriers to Rosetta use for the broader biological community. ROSIE is available at http://rosie.rosettacommons.org

A Paradigmatic Analysis of Digital Application Marketplaces

This paper offers a paradigmatic analysis of digital application marketplaces for advancing information systems (IS) research on digital platforms and ecosystems. We refer to the notion of digital application marketplace, colloquially called “appstores,” as a platform component that offers a venue for exchanging applications between developers and end-users belonging to a single or multiple ecosystems. Such marketplaces exhibit diversity in features and assumptions, and we propose that examining this diversity, and its ideal types, will help us to further understand the relationship between application marketplaces, platforms, and platform ecosystems. To this end, we generate a typology that distinguishes four kinds of digital application marketplaces: closed, censored, focused, and open marketplaces. The paper also offers implications for actors wishing to make informed decisions about their relationship to a particular digital application marketplace