Reuse of a usability functionality implementation in web applications

Volumen dedicated to CENTERIS 2013 - Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems / ProjMAN 2013 - International Conference on Project MANagement/ HCIST 2013 - International Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and TechnologiesSoftware system usability is recognized as a quality attribute related not only to the user interface but also to applications design. In this paper we analyse the feasibility of designing and programming reusable solutions for implementing usability features that have a major impact on design. We develop case studies to find common application scenarios, responsibilities, classes, methods, attributes and chunks of code, which we use to propose reusable solutions specified as patterns. In this paper we report the results for the progress feedback usability functionality.This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation Tecnologías para la Replicación y Síntesis de Experimentos en IS (TIN2011-23216) and Go Lite (TIN2011-24139) projects

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

Reusable Solutions for Implementing Usability Functionalities

Electronic version of an article published as International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Volume 25, Issue 04, May 2015, 727 http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/S0218194015500084 © World Scientific Publishing Company http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/ijsekeUsability is a software system quality attribute. Although software engineers originally considered usability to be related exclusively to the user interface, it was later found to affect the core functionality of software applications. As of then, proposals for addressing usability at different stages of the software development cycle were researched. The objective of this paper is to present three reusable solutions at detailed design and programming level in order to effectively implement the Abort Operation, Progress Feedback and Preferences usability functionalities in web applications. To do this, an inductive research method was applied. We developed three web applications including the above usability functionalities as case studies. We looked for commonalities across the implementations in order to induce a general solution. The elements common to all three developed applications include: application scenarios, functionalities, responsibilities, classes, methods, attributes and code snippets. The findings were specified as an implementation-oriented design pattern and as programming patterns in three languages. Additional case studies were conducted in order to validate the proposed solution. The independent developers used the patterns to implement different applications for each case study. As a result, we found that solutions specified as patterns can be reused to develop web applications.This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation “Tecnologías para la Replicación y Síntesis de Experimentos en IS” (TIN2011-23216) and “Go Lite” (TIN2011-24139) projects

Implementation of business intelligence tools using open source approach

Discovering business intelligence is the modern organization’s way of gaining competitive advantage in their market, supported by Decisions Support Systems or Business Intelligence Systems. The first step in any decision support system is to create the repository of data for the system to collect and display any information requested. This repository is the source of all business intelligence and implementing it requires the right software tools, essential for the data warehouse. Therefore, when choosing the software tool, the project size, budget constraints and risks should be kept in mind. Overall the right choice depends on the organization’s needs and ambitions. The essential work to be done here is to demonstrate that open source software can be an accurate and reliable tool to implement data warehouse projects. The two ETL solutions used were: • Pentaho Kettle Data Integration Community Editions (Open Source Software) • SQL Server 2005 Integrations Services (SSIS) Enterprise Edition (Proprietary Software) The proprietary, commercial software in question (as well as others) is widely used. However, an open source solution has key features recognized by organizations worldwide and this work will show the different functionalities and benefits of this open source approach.Nas organizações a descoberta de conhecimento do negócio é o processo para alcançar vantagem competitiva sobre os seus concorrentes, e esta é apoiada por Sistemas de Suporte á decisão ou por Business Intelligence termo atualmente em voga.A primeira coisa a fazer em qualquer tipo de sistema de apoio à decisão é criar o repositório de dados de informação onde o sistema vai recolher e mostrar todas as informações solicitadas. Este repositório é a fonte de todo o conhecimento do negócio, e a sua construção exige as ferramentas de software corretas para o desenvolvimento do data warehouse. Deve-se por isso ao escolher a ferramenta de software pensar nos requisitos para a seleção do software do mercado, a escolha do software envolve o tamanho do projecto, orçamento, ou riscos a tomar em mente. Globalmente, a escolha certa depende das necessidades de organização e suas ambições. O trabalho essencial a ser feito aqui é demonstrar que o software open source pode ser uma ferramenta fiavél e eficaz para implementar projetos de data warehouse. As duas soluções ETL utilizadas foram: • Pentaho Data Integration Chaleira Editions Comunidade (Open Source Software) • SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) Enterprise Edition (Software Proprietário) O software proprietario, comercial em questão (assim como outros) é amplamente utilizado. No entanto, uma solução de open source tem características fundamentais que são reconhecidas por organizações em todo o mundo e este trabalho irá mostrar as diferentes funcionalidades e benefícios desta abordagem de software open source

Visualizing Processes on the Web

In this paper, we describe 3WPS, a framework to build distributed systems that are able to monitor and interact with a process through a 3D interface that is accessible via the World Wide Web (WWW). The 3WPS is easily configurable, easily adaptable to different processes with high reuse of ts software components and its distributed architecture leverages on off-the-shelf components of the WWW infrastructure such as Java applets and Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) browsers. We describe the characteristics of 3WPS framework by mainly focusing on the issue of programmability and by contextually providing an example tour of its usage

Context-aware multi-factor authentication

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaAuthentication systems, as available today, are inappropriate for the requirements of ubiquitous, heterogeneous and large scale distributed systems. Some important limitations are: (i) the use of weak or rigid authentication factors as principal’s identity proofs, (ii) non flexibility to combine different authentication modes for dynamic and context-aware interaction criteria, (iii) not being extensible models to integrate new or emergent pervasive authentication factors and (iv) difficulty to manage the coexistence of multi-factor authentication proofs in a unified single sign-on solution. The objective of this dissertation is the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a platform supporting multi-factor authentication services, as a contribution to overcome the above limitations. The devised platform will provide a uniform and flexible authentication base for multi-factor authentication requirements and context-aware authentication modes for ubiquitous applications and services. The main contribution is focused on the design and implementation of an extensible authentication framework model, integrating classic as well as new pervasive authentication factors that can be composed for different context-aware dynamic requirements. Flexibility criteria are addressed by the establishment of a unified authentication back-end, supporting authentication modes as defined processes and rules expressed in a SAML based declarative markup language. The authentication base supports an extended single sign-on system that can be dynamically tailored for multi-factor authentication policies, considering large scale distributed applications and according with ubiquitous interaction needs

A methodology and a platform to measure and assess software windows of vulnerability

Nowadays, it is impossible not to recognize how software solutions have changed the world and the crucial role they play in our daily life. With their quick spread, especially in Cloud and Internet of Things contexts, security risks to which they are exposed have risen as well. Unfortunately, even if a lot of techniques have been realized to protect infrastructures from attackers, they are not enough to achieve truly secure systems. Therefore, since the price to pay for recovering from an outbreak can be enormous, organizations need a way to assess security of products they use. A useful and very overlooked metric that can be considered in this situations is the software window of vulnerability, which is the amount of time a software has been vulnerable to an attack. The main reason why this metric is often neglected is because the information required to compute it are provided by heterogeneous sources, and there is not a standard framework or at least a model that can simplify the task. Hence, the aim of this thesis will be filling this lack, at first by defining a model to evaluate software windows of vulnerability and then by implementing a platform able to compute this metric for software of different systems. Since keeping the approach general is not feasible outside of the theoretical model, the implementation step will necessarily require a system specific choice. Therefore, GNU/Linux systems were selected specifically for two reasons: their recent rise in popularity in the previously mentioned fields and their software management policy (which is based on package managers) that allows to find the data required by the analysis more easily

Design and programming patterns for implementing usability functionalities in web applications

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Systems and Software. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Systems and Software, VOL 105, (2015) DOI 10.1016/j.jss.2015.04.023Usability is a software system quality attribute. There are usability issues that have an impact not only on the user interface but also on the core functionality of applications. In this paper, three web applications were developed to discover patterns for implementing two usability functionalities with an impact on core functionality: Abort Operation and Progress Feedback. We applied an inductive process in order to identify reusable elements to implement the selected functionalities. For communication purposes, these elements are specified as design and programming patterns (PHP, VB.NET and Java). Another two web applications were developed in order to evaluate the patterns. The evaluation explores several issues such as ease of pattern understanding and ease of pattern use, as well as the final result of the applications. We found that it is feasible to reuse the identified solutions specified as patterns. The results also show that usability functionalities have features, like the level of coupling with the application or the complexity of each component of the solution, that simplify or complicate their implementation. In this case, the Abort Operation functionality turned out to be more feasible to implement than the Progress Feedback functionality.This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation “Tecnologías para la Replicación y Síntesis de Experimentosen IS” (TIN2011-23216) and “Go Lite” (TIN2011-24139) projects

Business Rules Integration on a Public Illumination Management System

Tese de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Sistemas de Informação), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2021This work is based on the proposal of integrating Business Rules in a software product called SIIP, intended to serve the Public Illumination Division of Lisbon’s city council, which is a public organization. This application helps manage all types of requests related to the city’s public illumination, such as maintenance or damage, storage management of public illumination components, and alert system integration. The current methods the Public Illumination Division uses are considered inefficient and outdated, and this work tries to contribute to that. The business rules integration will try to improve the features mentioned above by providing an automated alternative to some processes that are very costly with current outdated mechanisms. This implementation is a particular challenge in this project because of the current deprecated status of most public applications, as technological usage is not yet very well integrated within public divisions. This fact is also part of this work, creating a case study to compare the technological knowledge between private and public organizations. This study served as a knowledge base for getting a better context of the SIIP application. This work explains all the phases that a project of this kind should consider, including research about related applications and why Business Rules are essential, context gathering of the environment, client and application, and the development process of developing the application and creating an integration proposal of the Business Rules within the ap plication in order to promote better technological optimization within organizations. To further sustain the thesis of why Business Rules is an essential subject to this work, a case study was created and conducted, inquiring voluntary people about how public and private organizations differ in technological advances, difficulties, and access provision. At a final stage, the Business Rules integration proposal is then applied, which includes prototyping and development of the whole structure needed to integrate the Business Rules within the SIIP system, trying to promote its use to improve efficiency and better workflows