Transaction Support for DataWeb Applications - A Requirement\u27s Perspective

W eb-based purely providing read-only access to information in terms of static HTML pages. Rather, more and more web-based information systems store (part of) the information within a database system (DBS) and generate HTML pages on demand. Such information systems are often called DataWeb Applications. Different users interact with the system, and often they perform changes concurrently. As an example in the area of electronic commerce, consider a web-based tourism information system, where an unpredictable number of a priori unknown tourists are allowed to book various tourism facilities at the same time. Whereas financial and security issues of such electronic commerce transactions are extensively discussed in literature, very few work exists on the database transaction aspect in terms of consistency and reliability of electronic commerce transactions and of DataWeb applications in general. The objective of this paper is to discuss the specific requirements that different architectures of DataWeb applications and the web itself pose on transaction management, and to identify promising technologies for enabling web transaction services

UML-based Cloud Application Modeling with Libraries, Profiles, and Templates

Recently, several cloud modeling approaches have emerged. They address the diversity of cloud environments by introducing a considerable set of modeling concepts in terms of novel domain-specific languages. At the same time, general-purpose languages, such as UML, provide modeling concepts to represent software, platform and infrastructure artifacts from different viewpoints where the deployment view is of particular relevance for specifying the distribution of application components on the targeted cloud environments. However, the generic nature of UML’s deployment language calls for a cloud-specific extension to capture the plethora of cloud provider offerings at the modeling level. In this paper, we propose the Cloud Application Modeling Language (CAML) to facilitate expressing cloud-based deployments directly in UML, which is especially beneficial for migration scenarios where reverse-engineered UML models are tailored towards a selected cloud environment. We discuss CAML’s realization as a UML internal language that is based on a model library for expressing deployment topologies and a set of profiles for wiring them with cloud provider offerings. Finally, we report on the use of UML templates to contribute application deployments as reusable blueprints and identify conceptual mappings between CAML and the recently standardized TOSCA.European Commission ICT Policy Support Programme 31785

Automated verification of model transformations based on visual contracts

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10515-012-0102-yModel-Driven Engineering promotes the use of models to conduct the different phases of the software development. In this way, models are transformed between different languages and notations until code is generated for the final application. Hence, the construction of correct Model-to-Model (M2M) transformations becomes a crucial aspect in this approach. Even though many languages and tools have been proposed to build and execute M2M transformations, there is scarce support to specify correctness requirements for such transformations in an implementation-independent way, i.e., irrespective of the actual transformation language used. In this paper we fill this gap by proposing a declarative language for the specification of visual contracts, enabling the verification of transformations defined with any transformation language. The verification is performed by compiling the contracts into QVT to detect disconformities of transformation results with respect to the contracts. As a proof of concept, we also report on a graphical modeling environment for the specification of contracts, and on its use for the verification of transformations in several case studies.This work has been funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant P21374-N13, the Spanish Ministry of Science under grants TIN2008-02081 and TIN2011-24139, and the R&D programme of the Madrid Region under project S2009/TIC-1650

MDWEnet: a practical approach to achieving interoperability of model-driven web engineering methods

Current model-driven Web Engineering approaches (such as OO-H, UWE or WebML) provide a set of methods and supporting tools for a systematic design and development of Web applications. Each method addresses different concerns using separate models (content, navigation, presentation, business logic, etc.), and provide model compilers that produce most of the logic and Web pages of the application from these models. However, these proposals also have some limitations, especially for exchanging models or representing further modeling concerns, such as architectural styles, technology independence, or distribution. A possible solution to these issues is provided by making model-driven Web Engineering proposals interoperate, being able to complement each other, and to exchange models between the different tools. MDWEnet is a recent initiative started by a small group of researchers working on model-driven Web Engineering (MDWE). Its goal is to improve current practices and tools for the model-driven development of Web applications for better interoperability. The proposal is based on the strengths of current model-driven Web Engineering methods, and the existing experience and knowledge in the field. This paper presents the background, motivation, scope, and objectives of MDWEnet. Furthermore, it reports on the MDWEnet results and achievements so far, and its future plan of actions

Distributed Light-Weight Persistence in Java - A Tour on RMI- and CORBA-based Solutions

. Java has potential to support the development of distributed and autonomous though collaborating components in a network computing environment. To provide for the flow of objects between these components some kind of distributed shared memory is needed. So far, Java offers distributed shared memory aka distributed persistence by employing database systems. However, since the main features of database systems, such as transaction management and query languages, are often not needed for these applications, a so called lightweight solution is preferred. In this paper, we introduce the Persistence API supporting a distributed container structure for handling sets of structured data and objects. Distribution is realized both by means of Java's Remote Method Invocation and on top of the CORBA compliant Visibroker for Java. We highlight implementation differences and efforts for migrating between these two technologies. 1 Introduction Persistence is becoming more and more a primary featur..

Database Requirements for CIM Applications

Changes in market and production profiles require a more flexible concept in manufacturing. Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) describes an integrative concept for joining business and manufacturing islands. In this context database technology is the key technology for implementing the CIM philosophy. However, CIM applications are more complex, and thus, more demanding than traditional database applications like business and administrative applications. In this paper we systematically analyze the database requirements for CIM applications including business and manufacturing tasks. The article is original in the sense that special emphasis is given on integration requirements due to the distributed, partly isolated nature of CIM applications developed over the years. An illustrative sampling of current efforts in the database community to meet the challenge of non-standard applications like CIM concludes the paper. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.2.8 [Database Management] D..