Optimization of Web Services for Cloud Deployment and Mobile Consumption

Research performed for this thesis indicates an impedance mismatch between prevailing approaches to development of service-oriented enterprise applications and the consumption capabilities of mobile devices. The rich semantics and strong validation mechanisms inherent in SOAP-based web services, common to large-scale enterprise development, introduce inefficiencies of network bandwidth consumption and serialization/de-serialization processing requirements. These inefficiencies may be financially burdensome when systems are migrated to a cloud-based hosting environment and both costly and non-performant when accessed from network and processor constrained mobile devices. Yet wholesale abandonment of established enterprise practice and legacy systems for the adoption of unfamiliar architectural styles is rarely practical.  This thesis proposes a series of incremental changes to enterprise web services architecture that, individually, provide measurable efficiency benefits both when served from the cloud and when consumed from mobile devices. The objective of this research is to quantify the benefits and illustrate trade-offs for each. Within a cloud deployment, selective application of HTTP compression is shown to yield performance improvements in excess of 40% with data transfer  reductions of up to 85%. Analysis identifies the characteristics of services that suffer degraded performance under compression, and illustrates how similar performance and data reduction benefits may be achieved through service augmentation with alternative message and request formats.  Thesis focus then turns to options for improving efficiency in the consumption of these services from native applications on prevailing mobile device platforms. Development and measurements performed for this thesis identify approaches for faster and more efficient processing of existing services on mobile devices and relates these to the developer effort required. Further enhancements to application performance and development simplicity are demonstrated through mobile consumption of the augmented services and formats proposed for optimized cloud deployment. Research for this thesis suggests that in both cloud and mobile sides of a distributed system, performance and financial benefits may be achieved while building upon, rather than replacing, existing services code and architectural patterns.  M.S

Mobile Agent based Market Basket Analysis on Cloud

This paper describes the design and development of a location-based mobile shopping application for bakery product shops. Whole application is deployed on cloud. The three-tier architecture consists of, front-end, middle-ware and back-end. The front-end level is a location-based mobile shopping application for android mobile devices, for purchasing bakery products of nearby places. Front-end level also displays association among the purchased products. The middle-ware level provides a web service to generate JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) output from the relational database. It exchanges information and data between mobile application and servers in cloud. The back-end level provides the Apache Tomcat Web server and MySQL database. The application also uses the Google Cloud Messaging for generating and sending notification of orders to shopkeeper.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure

MAGDA: A Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture

Mobile agents mean both a technology and a programming paradigm. They allow for a flexible approach which can alleviate a number of issues present in distributed and Grid-based systems, by means of features such as migration, cloning, messaging and other provided mechanisms. In this paper we describe an architecture (MAGDA – Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture) we have designed and we are currently developing to support programming and execution of mobile agent based application upon Grid systems

AdSplit: Separating smartphone advertising from applications

A wide variety of smartphone applications today rely on third-party advertising services, which provide libraries that are linked into the hosting application. This situation is undesirable for both the application author and the advertiser. Advertising libraries require additional permissions, resulting in additional permission requests to users. Likewise, a malicious application could simulate the behavior of the advertising library, forging the user's interaction and effectively stealing money from the advertiser. This paper describes AdSplit, where we extended Android to allow an application and its advertising to run as separate processes, under separate user-ids, eliminating the need for applications to request permissions on behalf of their advertising libraries. We also leverage mechanisms from Quire to allow the remote server to validate the authenticity of client-side behavior. In this paper, we quantify the degree of permission bloat caused by advertising, with a study of thousands of downloaded apps. AdSplit automatically recompiles apps to extract their ad services, and we measure minimal runtime overhead. We also observe that most ad libraries just embed an HTML widget within and describe how AdSplit can be designed with this in mind to avoid any need for ads to have native code

Towards NFC payments using a lightweight architecture for the Web of Things

The Web (and Internet) of Things has seen the rapid emergence of new protocols and standards, which provide for innovative models of interaction for applications. One such model fostered by the Web of Things (WoT) ecosystem is that of contactless interaction between devices. Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is one such enabler of contactless interactions. Contactless technology for the WoT requires all parties to agree one common definition and implementation and, in this paper, we propose a new lightweight architecture for the WoT, based on RESTful approaches. We show how the proposed architecture supports the concept of a mobile wallet, enabling users to make secure payments employing NFC technology with their mobile devices. In so doing, we argue that the vision of the WoT is brought a step closer to fruition