GUISET: A CONCEPTUAL DESIGN OF A GRID-ENABLED PORTAL FOR E-COMMERCE ON-DEMAND SERVICES

Conventional grid-enabled portal designs have been largely influenced by the usual functional requirements such as security requirements, grid resource requirements and job management requirements. However, the pay-as-you-use service provisioning model of utility computing platforms mean that additional requirements must be considered in order to realize effective grid-enabled portals design for such platforms. This work investigates those relevant additional requirements that must be considered for the design of grid-enabled portals for utility computing contexts. Based on a thorough review of literature, we identified a number of those relevant additional requirements, and developed a grid-enabled portal prototype for the Grid-based Utility Infrastructure for SMME-enabling Technology (GUISET) initiative – a utility computing platform. The GUISET portal was designed to cater for both the traditional grid requirements and some of the relevant additional requirements for utility computing contexts. The result of the evaluation of the GUISET portal prototype using a set of benchmark requirements (standards) revealed that it fulfilled the minimum requirements to be suitable for the utility context

From Method Fragments to Method Services

In Method Engineering (ME) science, the key issue is the consideration of information system development methods as fragments. Numerous ME approaches have produced several definitions of method parts. Different in nature, these fragments have nevertheless some common disadvantages: lack of implementation tools, insufficient standardization effort, and so on. On the whole, the observed drawbacks are related to the shortage of usage orientation. We have proceeded to an in-depth analysis of existing method fragments within a comparison framework in order to identify their drawbacks. We suggest overcoming them by an improvement of the ?method service? concept. In this paper, the method service is defined through the service paradigm applied to a specific method fragment ? chunk. A discussion on the possibility to develop a unique representation of method fragment completes our contribution

Collaborative Environments. Considerations Concerning Some Collaborative Systems

It is obvious, that all collaborative environments (workgroups, communities of practice, collaborative enterprises) are based on knowledge and between collaboration and knowledge management there is a strong interdependence. The evolution of information systems in these collaborative environments led to the sudden necessity to adopt, for maintaining the virtual activities and processes, the latest technologies/systems, which are capable to support integrated collaboration in business services. In these environments, portal-based IT platforms will integrate multi-agent collaborative systems, collaborative tools, different enterprise applications and other useful information systems.collaboration, collaborative environments, knowledge management, collaborative systems, portals, knowledge portals, agile development of portals

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Uma abordagem para a integração dinâmica de serviços web em portais

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Elétrica.O desenvolvimento de aplicações baseadas no paradigma de Arquiteturas Orientadas a Serviços (ou SOA) vem tendo um grande e rápido crescimento nos últimos tempos como uma forma de reduzir custos e o tempo de desenvolvimento de software. Do ponto de vista de implementação, a tecnologia dos serviços web vem sendo a mais amplamente utilizada e adotada pelas principais empresas para seus sistemas de software. Serviços web provêem uma interface de invocação bem de?nida, mas apenas para outras aplicações. Para usuários, faz-se necessário o desenvolvimento de uma interface de usuário para cada serviço. Paralelamente a isto, cada vez mais as empresas utilizam portais como ambiente de interação usuário-aplicações, permitindo inclusive personalizações de acesso e visualização. Todavia, com as tecnologias atualmente disponíveis, o desenvolvimento e implantação de interfaces de usuário para serviços web em portais requerem por parte do programador grande conhecimento de uma série de tecnologias de informação, além de ser um processo relativamente lento e custoso. Esta dissertação propõe uma abordagem que automatiza esse processo. Ela permite que se gere dentro de um portal, de forma automática e dinâmica, a interface de usuário para um serviço baseado em seu descritor. Através desta, usuários podem fazer invocações ao serviço de forma dinâmica. Com vistas a analisar e avaliar a proposta, um componente genérico de portal foi implementado. The development of applications based on the Service-Oriented Architecture (or SOA) paradigm is growing greatly and fastly nowadays as a way to reduce costs and time of software development. From the implementation point of view, the web services technology is clearly the most used and adopted one by the main companies for theis software systems. Web services have well defined invocation interfaces, but only for other applications. For end-users, it is rather necessary to develop a user interface for each service. Alongside this, portals have been more and more used by companies for user-applications interaction, also allowing personalization of access and visualization. However, using the current technologies, the development and deployment of user interfaces for web services in portals requires, from the programmer side, great knowledge of a good number of associated information technologies, besides being a relatively slow and costly process. This dissertation proposes an approach that automates this process. It allows the automatic and dynamic generation of the web service#s user interface in a portal, based on the service descriptor. Through this interface, users can invoke services dynamically. In order to assess and to evaluate the proposal, a generic portal component has been implemented

Collaborative Environments. Considerations Concerning Some Collaborative Systems

It is obvious, that all collaborative environments (workgroups, communities of practice, collaborative enterprises) are based on knowledge and between collaboration and knowledge management there is a strong interdependence. The evolution of information systems in these collaborative environments led to the sudden necessity to adopt, for maintaining the virtual activities and processes, the latest technologies/systems, which are capable to support integrated collaboration in business services. In these environments, portal-based IT platforms will integrate multi-agent collaborative systems, collaborative tools, different enterprise applications and other useful information systems

Systémy založené na spolupráci služeb (SOA) používané mimo e-komerci

Katedra softwarového inženýrstvíDepartment of Software EngineeringFaculty of Mathematics and PhysicsMatematicko-fyzikální fakult

Driving The Business Service-Oriented Architecture Enabled Initiative

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) continues to gain interest and deliver its business value as so many organisations are force to integrate increasingly diverse legacy systems and complex application environments. Organisations are moving towards implementing SOA initiative to become business SOA-enabled for reducing complexity and increasing business agility. Driving the initiative of SOA into business requires a set of requirements in order to successfully implement SOA. These requirements are four fundamentals of SOA initiative with associated seven elements of SOA which have been discovered via thoroughly literature analysis. A model therefore is proposed for businesses to understand how to implement and run SOA to actually achieving benefits from their SOA initiative