WebFlow - A Visual Programming Paradigm for Web/Java Based Coarse Grain Distributed Computing

We present here the recent work at NPAC aimed at developing WebFlow---a general purpose Web based visual interactive programming environment for coarse grain distributed computing. We follow the 3-tier architecture with the central control and integration WebVM layer in tier-2, interacting with the visual graph editor applets in tier-1 (front-end) and the legacy systems in tier-3. WebVM is given by a mesh of Java Web servers such as Jeeves from JavaSoft or Jigsaw from MIT/W3C. All system control structures are implemented as URL-addressable servlets which enable Web browser-based authoring, monitoring, publication, documentation and software distribution tools for distributed computing. We view WebFlow/WEbVM as a promising programming paradigm and coordination model for the exploding volume of Web/Java software, and we illustrate it in a set of ongoing application development activities

Hierarchical Growing Cell Structures

We propose a hierarchical self-organizing neural network ("HiGS") with adaptive architecture and simple topological organization. This network combines features of Fritzke's Growing Cell Structures and traditional hierarchical clustering algorithms. The height and width of the tree structure depend on the user-specified level of error desired, and the weights in upper layers of the network do not change in later phases of the learning algorithm. Parameters such as node deletion rate are adaptively modified by the learning algorithm. 1. Introduction Connectionist learning systems often face the stability-plasticity dilemma [2]. Most unsupervised neural network learning algorithms are stable with respect to their topology and plastic with respect to weight vector adaptations; such is the case in Kohonen's topology-preserving self-organizing map (SOM) [4]. An exception is Fritzke's Growing Cell Structures (GCS) network [1], which is much more plastic in that nodes may be inserted ..

WebFlow - A Visual Programming Paradigm for Web/Java Based Coarse Grain Distributed Computing

We present here the recent work at NPAC aimed at developing WebFlow---a general purpose Web based visual interactive programming environment for coarse grain distributed computing. We follow the 3-tier architecture with the central control and integration WebVM layer in tier-2, interacting with the visual graph editor applets in tier-1 (front-end) and the legacy systems in tier-3. WebVM is given by a mesh of Java Web servers such as Jeeves from JavaSoft or Jigsaw from MIT/W3C. All system control structures are implemented as URL-addressable servlets which enable Web browser-based authoring, monitoring, publication, documentation and software distribution tools for distributed computing. We view WebFlow/WEbVM as a promising programming paradigm and coordination model for the exploding volume of Web/Java software, and we illustrate it in a set of ongoing application development activities. 1 Introduction As anticipated in our WebWindows ansatz [WebHPCC96], current Web systems, fueled by..