Quality-aware architectural model transformations in adaptive mashups user interfaces

The final publication is available at IOS Press through http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/FI-2016-0000Mashup user interfaces provides their functionality through the combination of different services. The integration of such services can be solved by using reusable and third-party components. Furthermore, these interfaces must be adapted to user preferences, context changes, user interactions and component availability. Model transformation is a useful mechanism to address this adaptation but normally these operations only focus on the functional requirements. In this sense, quality attributes should be included in the adaptation process to obtain the best adapted mashup user interface. This paper proposes a generic quality-aware transformation process to support the adaptation of software architectures. The transformation process has been applied in ENIA, a geographic information system, by constructing a specific quality model for the adaptation of mashup user interfaces. This model is taken into account for evaluating the different transformation alternatives and choosing the one that maximizes the quality assessments. The approach has been validated by a set of adaptation scenarios that are intended to maximize different quality factors and therefore apply distinct combinations of metrics.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Quality-aware mashup composition: issues, techniques and tools

Web mashups are a new generation of applications based on the composition of ready-to-use, heterogeneous components. In different contexts, ranging from the consumer Web to Enterprise systems, the potential of this new technology is to make users evolve from passive receivers of applications to actors actively involved in the creation of their artifacts, thus accommodating the inherent variability of the users’ needs. Current advances in mashup technologies are good candidates to satisfy this requirement. However, some issues are still largely unexplored. In particular, quality issues specific for this class of applications, and the way they can guide the users in the identification of adequate components and composition patterns, are neglected. This paper discusses quality dimensions that can capture the intrinsic quality of mashup components, as well as the components’ capacity to maximize the quality and the userperceived value of the overall composition. It also proposes an assisted composition process in which quality becomes the driver for recommending to the users how to complete mashups, based on the integration of quality assessment and recommendation techniques within a tool for mashup development

Merging Special Collections with GIS Technology to Enhance the User Experience

This analysis evaluates how PhillyHistory.org merged their unique special collection materials with geospatial-based progressive technology to challenge and educate the global community. A new generation of technologically savvy researchers has emerged that expect a more enhanced user experience than earlier generations. To meet these needs, collection managers are collaborating with community and local institutions to increase online access to materials; mixing best metadata practices with custom elements to create map mashups; and merging progressive GIS technology and geospatial based applications with their collections to enhance the user experience. The PhillyHistory.org website was analyzed to explore how they used various geospatial technology to create a new type of digital content management system based on geographical information and make their collections accessible via online software and mobile applications

A look at cloud architecture interoperability through standards

Enabling cloud infrastructures to evolve into a transparent platform while preserving integrity raises interoperability issues. How components are connected needs to be addressed. Interoperability requires standard data models and communication encoding technologies compatible with the existing Internet infrastructure. To reduce vendor lock-in situations, cloud computing must implement universal strategies regarding standards, interoperability and portability. Open standards are of critical importance and need to be embedded into interoperability solutions. Interoperability is determined at the data level as well as the service level. Corresponding modelling standards and integration solutions shall be analysed

A Usability Evaluation Framework for

Currently, more than two billions people access the Web for various purposes. The majority are people without programming or modelling background. Part of these people (called end-users) also likes to create their own Web applications to meet their daily needs. Mashup Makers are tools to create such end-user’s Web applications. As such, Mashup Makers could become the dominant environment for end-user development of Web applications. Existing Mashup Makers promise that creating a Web Mashup is very easy and just a matter of a few mouse clicks. However, there is no evidence that this is indeed the case. On the contrary, research has already revealed usability problems with Mashup Makers. Therefore, this thesis concentrates on the usability of Mashup Makers as development environments for Web applications for end-users. Usability is a key issue for the success of software artifacts, and especially if the artifacts are intended for non-technical users. Therefore, we target the achievement of a consolidated approach, model, and framework for the evaluation of the usability of Mashup Makers for end-users. Such a framework will not only allow evaluating the usability of existing Mashup Makers, but it will also provide key issues concerning usability (ie usability impact factors) that developers of Mashup Makers and of other future end-user development tools can take into consideration when developing new tools

Conceptual development of custom, domain-specific mashup platforms

Despite the common claim by mashup platforms that they enable end-users to develop their own software, in practice end-users still don't develop their own mashups, as the highly technical or inexistent user bases of today's mashup platforms testify. The key shortcoming of current platforms is their general-purpose nature, that privileges expressive power over intuitiveness. In our prior work, we have demonstrated that a domainspecific mashup approach, which privileges intuitiveness over expressive power, has much more potential to enable end-user development (EUD). The problem is that developing mashup platforms - domain-specific or not - is complex and time consuming. In addition, domain-specific mashup platforms by their very nature target only a small user basis, that is, the experts of the target domain, which makes their development not sustainable if it is not adequately supported and automated. With this article, we aim to make the development of custom, domain-specific mashup platforms costeffective. We describe a mashup tool development kit (MDK) that is able to automatically generate a mashup platform (comprising custom mashup and component description languages and design-time and runtime environments) from a conceptual design and to provision it as a service. We equip the kit with a dedicated development methodology and demonstrate the applicability and viability of the approach with the help of two case studies. © 2014 ACM

A Metadirectory of Web Components for Mashup Composition

Because of the growing availability of third-party APIs, services, widgets and any other reusable web component, mashup developers now face a vast amount of candidate components for their developments. Moreover, these components quite often are scattered in many different repositories and web sites, which makes difficult their selection or discovery. In this paper, we discuss the problem of component selection in Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Mashup-Driven Development, and introduce the Linked Mashups Ontology (LiMOn), a model that allows describing mashups and their components for integrating and sharing mashup information such as categorization or dependencies. The model has allowed the building of an integrated, centralized metadirectory of web components for query and selection, which has served to evaluate the model. The metadirectory allows accessing various heterogeneous repositories of mashups and web components while using external information from the Linked Data cloud, helping mashup development

Recommendation and weaving of reusable mashup model patterns for assisted development

With this article, we give an answer to one of the open problems of mashup development that users may face when operating a model-driven mashup tool, namely the lack of modeling expertise. Although commonly considered simple applications, mashups can also be complex software artifacts depending on the number and types of Web resources (the components) they integrate. Mashup tools have undoubtedly simplified mashup development, yet the problem is still generally nontrivial and requires intimate knowledge of the components provided by the mashup tool, its underlying mashup paradigm, and of how to apply such to the integration of the components. This knowledge is generally neither intuitive nor standardized across different mashup tools and the consequent lack of modeling expertise affects both skilled programmers and end-user programmers alike. In this article, we show how to effectively assist the users of mashup tools with contextual, interactive recommendations of composition knowledge in the form of reusable mashup model patterns. We design and study three different recommendation algorithms and describe a pattern weaving approach for the one-click reuse of composition knowledge. We report on the implementation of three pattern recommender plugins for different mashup tools and demonstrate via user studies that recommending and weaving contextual mashup model patterns significantly reduces development times in all three cases

Quality of Web Mashups: A Systematic Mapping Study

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04244-2_8Web mashups are a new generation of applications based on the composition of ready-to-use, heterogeneous components. They are gaining momentum thanks to their lightweight composition approach, which represents a new opportunity for companies to leverage on past investments in SOA, Web services, and public APIs. Although several studies are emerging in order to address mashup development, no systematic mapping studies have been reported on how quality issues are being addressed. This paper reports a systematic mapping study on which and how the quality of Web mashups has been addressed and how the product quality-aware approaches have been defined and validated. The aim of this study is to provide a background in which to appropriately develop future research activities. A total of 38 research papers have been included from an initial set of 187 papers. Our results provided some findings regarding how the most relevant product quality characteristics have been addressed in different artifacts and stages of the development process. They have also been useful to detect some research gaps, such as the need of more controlled experiments and more quality-aware mashup development proposals for other characteristics which being important for the Web domain have been neglected such as Usability and ReliabilityThis work is funded by the MULTIPLE project (TIN2009-13838), the Senescyt program (scholarships 2011), and the Erasmus Mundus Programme of the European Commission under the Transatlantic Partnership for Excellence in Engineering - TEE Project.Cedillo Orellana, IP.; Fernández Martínez, A.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM. (2013). Quality of Web Mashups: A Systematic Mapping Study. En Current Trends in Web Engineering. Springer. 66-78. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04244-2_8S6678Alkhalifa, E.: The Future of Enterprise Mashups. Business Insights. E-Strategies for Resource Management Systems (2009)Beemer, B., Gregg, D.: Mashups: A Literature Review and Classification Framework. Future Internet 1, 59–87 (2009)Cappiello, C., Daniel, F., Matera, M.: A Quality Model for Mashup Components. In: Gaedke, M., Grossniklaus, M., Díaz, O. (eds.) ICWE 2009. LNCS, vol. 5648, pp. 236–250. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)Cappiello, C., Daniel, F., Matera, M., Pautasso, C.: Information Quality in Mashups. IEEE Internet Computing 14(4), 32–40 (2010)Cappiello, C., Matera, M., Picozzi, M., Daniel, F., Fernandez, A.: Quality-Aware Mashup Composition: Issues, Techniques and Tools. In: 8th International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology (QUATIC 2012), pp. 10–19 (2012)Fenton, N.E., Pfleeger, S.L.: Software Metrics: A Rigorous and Practical Approach, 2nd edn. International Thompson 1996, pp. I–XII, 1–638 (1996) ISBN 978-1-85032-275-7Fernandez, A., Insfran, E., Abrahão, S.: Usability evaluation methods for the web: A systematic mapping study. Information and Software Technology 53(8), 789–817 (2011)Garousi, V., Mesbah, A., Betin-Can, A., Mirshokraie, S.: A systematic mapping study of web application testing. Information and Software Technology 55(8), 1374–1396 (2013)Grammel, L., Storey, M.-A.: A survey of mashup development environments. In: Chignell, M., Cordy, J., Ng, J., Yesha, Y. (eds.) The Smart Internet. LNCS, vol. 6400, pp. 137–151. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Hoyer, V., Fischer, M.: Market Overview of Enterprise Mashup Tools. In: Bouguettaya, A., Krueger, I., Margaria, T. (eds.) ICSOC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5364, pp. 708–721. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)ISO/IEC: ISO/IEC 25010 Systems and software engineering. Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE). System and software quality models (2011)Kitchenham, B., Charters, S.: Guidelines for performing Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering. Version 2.3, ESBE Technical Report, Keele University, UK (2007)Mendes, E.: A systematic review on the Web engineering research. In: International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE 2005), pp. 498–507 (2005)OrangeLabs: State of the Art in Mashup tools, SocEDA project, pp. 1–59 (2011)Petersen, K., Feldt, R., Mujtaba, S., Mattsson, M.: Systematic mapping studies in software engineering. In: 12th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE), pp. 68–77 (2008)Raza, M., Hussain, F.K., Chang, E.: A methodology for quality-based mashup of data sources. In: 10th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (iiWAS 2008), pp. 528–533 (2008)Saeed, A.: A Quality-based Framework for Leveraging the Process of Mashup Component Selection (2009), https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/21953Sharma, A., Hellmann, T.D., Maurer, F.: Testing of Web Services - A Systematic Mapping. In: 8th World Congress on Services (SERVICES 2012), pp. 346–352 (2012