Web API Fragility: How Robust is Your Web API Client

Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API's evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether mobile application developers understand and how they deal with the added distress of web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 48 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding web API integration.Comment: Technical repor

Developing Mobile Learning Applications for Android using Web Services

The evolution of today's mobile devices increases the number of mobile applications developed, and among them the mobile learning applications. Mobile hardware and software platforms allow running of faster and richer applications. This paper presents the main steps in development of a distributed mobile learning application for Android. The client application communicates with the server using Web services. The prototype developed includes the testing module.Mobile Application, Android Operating System, Web Service

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

Mobile health data: investigating the data used by an mHealth app using different mobile app architectures

Mobile Health (mHealth) has come a long way in the last forty years and is still rapidly evolving and presenting many opportunities. The advancements in mobile technology and wireless mobile communication technology contributed to the rapid evolution and development of mHealth. Consequently, this evolution has led to mHealth solutions that are now capable of generating large amounts of data that is synchronised and stored on remote cloud and central servers, ensuring that the data is distributable to healthcare providers and available for analysis and decision making. However, the amount of data used by mHealth apps can contribute significantly to the overall cost of implementing a new or upscaling an existing mHealth solution. The purpose of this research was to determine if the amount of data used by mHealth apps would differ significantly if they were to be implemented using different mobile app architectures. Three mHealth apps using different mobile app architectures were developed and evaluated. The first app was a native app, the second was a standard mobile Web app and the third was a mobile Web app that used Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX). Experiments using the same data inputs were conducted on the three mHealth apps. The primary objective of the experiments was to determine if there was a significant difference in the amount of data used by different versions of an mHealth app when implemented using different mobile app architectures. The experiment results demonstrated that native apps that are installed and executed on local mobile devices used the least amount of data and were more data efficient than mobile Web apps that executed on mobile Web browsers. It also demonstrated that mobile apps implemented using different mobile app architectures will demonstrate a significant difference in the amount of data used during normal mobile app usage

Agent communication network-a mobile agent computation model for Internet applications

[[abstract]]We propose a graph-based model, with a simulation, for the mobile agents to evolve over the Internet. Based on the concepts of Food Web (or Food Chain), one of the natural laws that we may use besides neural networks and genetic algorithms, we define an agent niche overlap graph and agent evolution states for the distributed computation of mobile agent evolution. The proposed computation model can be used in distributed Internet applications such as commerce programs, intelligent Web searching engine, and others.[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]19990706~19990708[[conferencelocation]]Red Sea, Egyp

Massive on-line learning: moving from web to mobile

Nowadays, web and mobile technologies and new communication paradigms offer many opportunities to improve services within University Campuses. Politecnico di Torino has developed various approaches to on-line (distance) learning, using a set of tools and methodologies to follow the rapid evolution of teaching paradigms: from traditional distance learning models to hybrid and blended models, up to the most recent flipped and MOOC approaches. The on-line learning system is designed to be used by both face-to-face and remote students for a total of 33.000 people organized in 51 bachelors and master of science programs. Today it shows 1.000.000 logins/month and it provides access to 430.000 files of teaching materials for a total of 80.000.000 downloads/year. Particularly relevant is the service of video recorded lectures with its 80 courses for a total of about 3.000 recorded, one hour lessons per year; this generates over 1.200.000 video streaming/downloads per year. In this scenario, the use of mobile technologies is quickly growing, becoming the favourite medium to access services and information in the University context. According to the technological evolution, Politecnico di Torino improved its services moving from a traditional Web approach to a mobile APP model via the intermediate steps of web responsive and mobile web models. This paper describes the strategies and the technical choices to design and implement the teaching portal of Politecnico including the new PoliTO App, the official App to step into the campus, providing learning, streaming, logistic and administrative services to student and teachers. The paper also includes the efficiency analysis of the model which correlates the access to the video-lectures and the students’ achieved performances

Using Food Web as an evolution computing model for Internet-based multimedia agents

[[abstract]]The ecosystem is an evolutionary result of natural laws. Food Web (or Food Chain) embeds a set of computation rules of natural balance. Based one the concepts of Food Web, one of the laws that we may learn from the natural besides neural networks and genetic algorithms, we propose a theoretical computation model for mobile agent evolution on the Internet. We define an agent niche overlap graph and agent evolution states. We also propose a set of algorithms, which is used in our multimedia search programs, to simulate agent evolution. Agents are cloned to live on a remote host station based on three different strategies: the brute force strategy, the semi-brute force strategy, and the selective strategy. Evaluations of different strategies are discussed. Guidelines of writing mobile agent programs are proposed. The technique can be used in distributed information retrieval which allows the computation load to be added to servers, but significantly reduces the traffic of network communication.[[conferencedate]]19990607~19990611[[conferencelocation]]Florence, Ital

Reliable Web Service Consumption Through Mobile Cloud Computing

The mobile intermittent wireless connectivity limits the evolution of the mobile landscape. Achieving web service reliability results in low communication overhead and correct retrieval of the appropriate state response. In this chapter, we discuss and analyze two approaches based on middleware approach, Reliable Service Architecture using Middleware (RSAM), and Reliable Approach using Middleware and WebSocket (RAMWS). These approaches achieve the reliability of web services consumed by mobile devices and propose an enhanced architecture that achieves the reliability under various conditions with minimum communication data overhead. In these experiments, we covered several cases to prove the achievement of reliability. Results also show that the request size was found to be constant, the response size is identical to the traditional architecture, and the increase in the consumption time was less than 5% with the different response sizes

Model-driven dual caching For nomadic service-oriented architecture clients

Mobile devices have evolved over the years from resource constrained devices that supported only the most basic tasks to powerful handheld computing devices. However, the most significant step in the evolution of mobile devices was the introduction of wireless connectivity which enabled them to host applications that require internet connectivity such as email, web browsers and maybe most importantly smart/rich clients. Being able to host smart clients allows the users of mobile devices to seamlessly access the Information Technology (IT) resources of their organizations. One increasingly popular way of enabling access to IT resources is by using Web Services (WS). This trend has been aided by the rapid availability of WS packages/tools, most notably the efforts of the Apache group and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) vendors. But the widespread use of WS raises questions for users of mobile devices such as laptops or PDAs; how and if they can participate in WS. Unlike their “wired” counterparts (desktop computers and servers) they rely on a wireless network that is characterized by low bandwidth and unreliable connectivity.The aim of this thesis is to enable mobile devices to host Web Services consumers. It introduces a Model-Driven Dual Caching (MDDC) approach to overcome problems arising from temporarily loss of connectivity and fluctuations in bandwidth