Selecting a State Management Strategy for Modern Web Frontend Applications

State management system plays an essential role in any application. Just as the circulatory system in a living organism aids in transporting nutrients and other vital materials from where they are produced to where they are used to keep the body alive and healthy, the state management system of an application defines how data is controlled, distributed and moves around within the application. However, managing the state of an application could quickly get complex and if not properly addressed, could lead to various issues with the application. The purpose of this research work is to provide a strategy for managing the state of a modern frontend web application to avoid common state-related pitfalls that could arise in the lifetime of an application. To achieve this goal, the thesis work provides a guideline that answers the questions on what should be considered when choosing a state management system and how the states of a frontend application should be handled. To show the effectiveness of this guideline, a case study was conducted on an application called Nokia Test Automation Platform (NTAP) which is an automated test-line solution developed at Nokia. The case study involved re-implementing the NTAP state management system based on the proposed strategy and then comparing the results of similar tests taken before and after the re-implementation. The result of this work includes the identification of features of frontend state and frontend state management, a strategy for modern frontend web state management and the re-implementation of the state management system of NTAP

Generating and using community intelligence: the case of neighbourhood policing.

This paper examines the role that community-generated information plays in neighbourhood policing, a key component of the UK police reform agenda. The neighbourhood policing agenda is concerned with the delivery of a consistent presence of dedicated neighbourhood teams which should be visible and accessible to the community. However, it also calls for the generation of community intelligence which should be used for local problem-solving and should be incorporated into National Intelligence Model (NIM) tasking. At the time of writing, the principle of incorporating information generated from the public into policing intelligence and priority setting thus has strong resonance, at least at the level of rhetoric of policy and practice. It is contended that difficult questions are posed in thinking through what it means to consult with the public, the nature of community-generated information and how it is translated into operational decisions and resource deployment. This paper explores the conceptual foundations of neighbourhood policing which are found in reassurance policing, problem-oriented policing and the National Intelligence Model. It then examines the current mechanisms for generating community information, prioritising problems, and delivering responses as they are applied in neighbourhood policing. It finishes with a critical discussion of the concept and practice of generating and using community information for setting local policing priorities

VennCafe

Our senior project involved creating a simple dating application and service. From other dating applications, we observed that the logistics of scheduling a first date are a tedious way to start a conversation with someone you\u27ve never met. The main concept of our application was that it would use user schedule availability and their favorite cafes to automatically plan optimal dates. We started the project with the intent of... Working through the entire development cycle of a large project as a team Devising techniques for determining overlapping preferences, especially when handling large amounts of location and time data Exploring different languages, tools and frameworks, especially involving web front-ends and native mobile apps Gaining a brief glimpse of what it would be like to be an entrepreneur promoting a new produc

Towards Mobile Twin Peaks for App Development

Requirements of mobile apps are often hard to elicit from massive numbers of users, although it is important for the solution architecture to meet them. Mobile Twin Peaks approach is proposed as a process of developing apps concurrently and iteratively that incorporates bidirectional communications within a mobile app. The communications allow both requirements engineers and software architects to reach a consensus on functionalities and quality constraints and to adapt architectural design decisions appropriately. To recommend architectural design decisions to the developers, we aim to obtain architecture- critical requirements from a set of general apps by combining, for example, analytics, ethnographic study, and information retrieval. We argue that the effectiveness of these techniques could be evaluated by experimental case studies and by engaging with industry partners to perform action research

A framework for Operational Security Metrics Development for industrial control environment

Security metrics are very crucial towards providing insights when measuring security states and susceptibilities in industrial operational environments. Obtaining practical security metrics depend on effective security metrics development approaches. To be effective, a security metrics development framework should be scope-definitive, objective-oriented, reliable, simple, adaptable, and repeatable (SORSAR). A framework for Operational Security Metrics Development (OSMD) for industry control environments is presented, which combines concepts and characteristics from existing approaches. It also adds the new characteristic of adaptability. The OSMD framework is broken down into three phases of: target definition, objective definition, and metrics synthesis. A case study scenario is used to demonstrate an instance of how to implement and apply the proposed framework to demonstrate its usability and workability. Expert elicitation has also be used to consolidate the validity of the proposed framework. Both validation approaches have helped to show that the proposed framework can help create effective and efficient ICS-centric security metrics taxonomy that can be used to evaluate capabilities or vulnerabilities. The understanding from this can help enhance security assurance within industrial operational environments

A framework for Operational Security Metrics Development for industrial control environment

Security metrics are very crucial towards providing insights when measuring security states and susceptibilities in industrial operational environments. Obtaining practical security metrics depend on effective security metrics development approaches. To be effective, a security metrics development framework should be scope-definitive, objective-oriented, reliable, simple, adaptable, and repeatable (SORSAR). A framework for Operational Security Metrics Development (OSMD) for industry control environments is presented, which combines concepts and characteristics from existing approaches. It also adds the new characteristic of adaptability. The OSMD framework is broken down into three phases of: target definition, objective definition, and metrics synthesis. A case study scenario is used to demonstrate an instance of how to implement and apply the proposed framework to demonstrate its usability and workability. Expert elicitation has also be used to consolidate the validity of the proposed framework. Both validation approaches have helped to show that the proposed framework can help create effective and efficient ICS-centric security metrics taxonomy that can be used to evaluate capabilities or vulnerabilities. The understanding from this can help enhance security assurance within industrial operational environments

Awareness and Preparedness of IT managers to digital disruption: A South African Exploratory Case Study

Digital disruption is breaking down long established business models. In most organisations, IT managers are charged with management of technology-enabled change. It is therefore important that IT managers understand the opportunities and challenges posed by digital disruption to aid the organisation\u27s response. The purpose of this study was to explore what South African IT managers perceive, and what their responses (or planned responses) to digital disruption within the context of a financial services organisation are. The study is interpretive, exploratory and qualitative, drawing from situational awareness theory to ground the participants’ perception of digital disruption. The study draws on Disruptive Innovation Theory to assess the participants’ actual (or planned) responses to digital disruption. The findings indicate that IT managers perceive digital disruption as both technological disruption and sense making mechanism for changes in work practices, along with posing several new opportunities and challenges

A Domain Specific Graphical User Interface Framework

Since the early days of software development, there has been an ongoing trend towards higher-order or higher level abstractions in programming languages, software libraries and application frameworks. Some of the arguments for software development tools with higher levels of abstraction include simpler software development, improved portability and better maintainability. Higher level abstractions can however lead to reduced performance. This thesis presents an innovative graphical user interface software solution that mixes high-level and low-level approaches to achieve acceptable performance while retaining good maintainability. The solution is an extension to a graphical application framework called JavaFX. The scope of this thesis is defined by a software development project which goal is to create a graphical user interface framework. The framework is used in the creation of customer specific user interfaces for an accompanying intralogistics system. The resulting user interfaces must be able to visualize possibly thousands of objects moving on a factory floor. The views must simultaneously support user-initiated zooming, panning, and tilting of the two-dimensional view. Meeting these requirements while maintaining acceptable performance, requires an unconventional solution and a deviation from idiomatic JavaFX. The user interface framework in question is developed using a high-level graphical user interface application framework called JavaFX. JavaFX is the most recent graphical user interface toolkit included in the official Java Development Kit. It has many reactive traits and other modern high-level properties. Overcoming performance challenges with JavaFX when producing views with thousands of animated items was the key research challenge in this research. Some attention is also given to replacing JavaFX built-in dependency injection system with Spring framework to improve JavaFX suitability to the task at hand. This thesis presents a hybrid solution that overcomes JavaFX’s performance challenges in the problem domain, while retaining as much as possible of the usefulness of the high-level features present in the JavaFX framework. The key innovation is a mechanism that enables automated rendering of sprite-bitmaps from JavaFX scene-graph nodes. The solution includes a system that draws the automatically generated bitmaps to a lower-level JavaFX component called Canvas. The solution enables layered mixing of regular JavaFX views with the custom high-performance views, including seamless resizing and event handling between the two types of views. The solution enables the developers of customer specific user interfaces to choose an appropriate graphics rendering type, such that only objects that cause performance issues, typically items which number exceeds dozens, need to use the more complex high-performance system