The OMII Software Distribution

This paper describes the work carried out at the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII) and the key elements of the OMII software distribution that have been developed in collaboration with members of the Managed Programme Initiative. The main objective of the OMII is to preserve and consolidate the achievements of the UK e-Science Programme by collecting, maintaining and improving the software modules that form the key components of a generic Grid middleware. Recently, the activity at Southampton has been extended beyond 2009 through a new project, OMII-UK, that forms a partnership that now includes the OGSA-DAI activities at Edinburgh and the myGrid project at Manchester

Modeling views in the layered view model for XML using UML

In data engineering, view formalisms are used to provide flexibility to users and user applications by allowing them to extract and elaborate data from the stored data sources. Conversely, since the introduction of Extensible Markup Language (XML), it is fast emerging as the dominant standard for storing, describing, and interchanging data among various web and heterogeneous data sources. In combination with XML Schema, XML provides rich facilities for defining and constraining user-defined data semantics and properties, a feature that is unique to XML. In this context, it is interesting to investigate traditional database features, such as view models and view design techniques for XML. However, traditional view formalisms are strongly coupled to the data language and its syntax, thus it proves to be a difficult task to support views in the case of semi-structured data models. Therefore, in this paper we propose a Layered View Model (LVM) for XML with conceptual and schemata extensions. Here our work is three-fold; first we propose an approach to separate the implementation and conceptual aspects of the views that provides a clear separation of concerns, thus, allowing analysis and design of views to be separated from their implementation. Secondly, we define representations to express and construct these views at the conceptual level. Thirdly, we define a view transformation methodology for XML views in the LVM, which carries out automated transformation to a view schema and a view query expression in an appropriate query language. Also, to validate and apply the LVM concepts, methods and transformations developed, we propose a view-driven application development framework with the flexibility to develop web and database applications for XML, at varying levels of abstraction

XML for Domain Viewpoints

Within research institutions like CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) there are often disparate databases (different in format, type and structure) that users need to access in a domain-specific manner. Users may want to access a simple unit of information without having to understand detail of the underlying schema or they may want to access the same information from several different sources. It is neither desirable nor feasible to require users to have knowledge of these schemas. Instead it would be advantageous if a user could query these sources using his or her own domain models and abstractions of the data. This paper describes the basis of an XML (eXtended Markup Language) framework that provides this functionality and is currently being developed at CERN. The goal of the first prototype was to explore the possibilities of XML for data integration and model management. It shows how XML can be used to integrate data sources. The framework is not only applicable to CERN data sources but other environments too.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, conference report from SCI'2001 Multiconference on Systemics & Informatics, Florid

Scala Server Faces

Progress in the Java language has been slow over the last few years. Scala is emerging as one of the probable successors for Java with features such as type inference, higher order functions, closure support and sequence comprehensions. This allows object-oriented yet concise code to be written using Scala. While Java based MVC frameworks are still prevalent, Scala based frameworks along with Ruby on Rails, Django and PHP are emerging as competitors. Scala has a web framework called Lift which has made an attempt to borrow the advantages of other frameworks while keeping code concise. Since Sun’s MVC framework, Java Server Faces 2.0 and its future versions seem to be heading in a reasonably progressive direction; I have developed a framework which attempts to overcome its limitations. I call such a framework ―Scala Server Faces‖. This framework provides a way of writing Java EE applications in Scala yet borrow from the concept of ―convention over configuration‖ followed by rival web frameworks. Again, an Eclipse tool is provided to make the programmer\u27s task of writing code on the popular Eclipse platform. Scala Server Faces, the framework and the tool allows the programmer to write enterprise web applications in Scala by providing features such as templating support, CRUD screen generation for database model objects, an Ant script to help deployment and integration with the Glassfish Application Server