Some Research Perspectives on Ajax

Despite Ajax is cool, it is often said that it is not about technologies but just about techniques.
Then, are there any research oppotunities on this topic?

A good platform for a rich client.

• In this sense, Ajax is important only because it is based on standards. Usually, nothing is required for client node configuration.
• Problem here is that it has several restrictions for building rich GUI, such as, the "back button" problem. Employing a better client environment, which is not a standard, instead of Ajax doesn't make sense from this viewpoint. For example, proposing better GUI with Macromedia Flash is not so good way as a research direction. Proposing better standards for better GUI (based of studies on what is desired, which is not available with the current standards) makes some sense, though.

A target of GUI-enabled software development.

• In this sense, Ajax is yet another target platform in developing application software.
• Research direction arized here is the unification of development efforts for other possible GUI platforms, that are, AWT/SWT for example. For example, the goal "write once to run on both Eclipse and Ajax" is not bad.

A good GUI with dynamic interactions between human and network.

• In this sense, applications with Ajax often provides good user experience. I believe it mostly comes from the asynchronousness thanks to XMLHttpRequest. Though it must have been possible with conventional fat clients, they have rarely done maybe because of some difficulty in use of Web Services (REST, SOAP, whatever) with clients (not servers).
• There may be rooms for investigating potential GUI enhancements in this area.

Today's Paper: Chikenfoot - Ajax-based Webapp programming system by Michael Zolin, et al.

An excellent paper (in fact, a best-paper-awarded paper) describing technologies (a Web application development tool) with Ajax-like techniques.

Michael Bolin, Matthew Webber, Philip Rha, Tom Wilson, Robert Miller, Automation and Customization of Rendered Web Pages, In Proc. of UIST 2005, Seattle, WA, USA, Oct 23-26, 2005.

A pdf file available from:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/chickenfoot/uist05.pdf

Title:
Automation and Customization of Rendered Web Pages
Abstract:
On the desktop, an application can expect to control its user
interface down to the last pixel, but on the World Wide
Web, a content provider has no control over how the client
will view the page, once delivered to the browser. This creates
an opportunity for end-users who want to automate and
customize their web experiences, but the growing complexity
of web pages and standards prevents most users from
realizing this opportunity. We describe Chickenfoot, a programming
system embedded in the Firefox web browser,
which enables end-users to automate, customize, and integrate
web applications without examining their source code.
One way Chickenfoot addresses this goal is a novel technique
for identifying page components by keyword pattern
matching. We motivate this technique by studying how
users name web page components, and present a heuristic
keyword matching algorithm that identifies the desired
component from the user’s name.

Today's Book: The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction, Third Edition

The Rational Unified Process unifies the entire software development team and optimizes the productivity of every team member by putting the collective experience derived from thousands of projects and many industry leaders at your fingertips. Philippe Kruchten's concise book offers a quick introduction to the concepts, structure, content, and motivation of the Rational Unified Process—a Web-enabled software engineering process that enhances team productivity and delivers software best practices to all team members. The Rational Unified Process is unique in that it allows development teams to recognize the full benefits of the Unified Modeling Language (UML), software automation, and other industry best practices.

• Philippe Kruchten, The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction, 3rd Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2000.

Requirements for shifts to SOA

Supporting the smooth shift from legacy components to SOA-enabled (Service Oriented Architecture) ones in enterprise architecture is a key requirement for wide-SOA adoption. An SOA structures large applications into reusable building blocks called “services” that respond rapidly to changing business conditions. For an enterprise, in order benefiting from SOA, they first need to transform their enterprise architecture so that it is at least partially SOA-enabled. However, it is often the case with enterprise that they also hate to dispose their current IT systems so drastically. In such situation, reusing legacy components rather than re-implementing them from scratch for provided SOA-enabled components is a preferred approach to SOA adoption for an enterprise in the real world.

Papers on Enterprise Server Performance Testing

I have just searched a bit for papers on performance testing that is specialized for enterprise servers.

Elaine J. Weyuker (DBLP) and her colleagues have done extensive work in this area.
http://www.research.att.com/info/weyuker/

Selected papers are listed below:

• Alberto Avritzer, Elaine J. Weyuker: The Role of Modeling in the Performance Testing of E-Commerce Applications. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 30(12): 1072-1083 (2004)
• Elaine J. Weyuker, Alberto Avritzer: A metric for predicting the performance of an application under a growing workload. IBM Systems Journal 41(1): 45-54 (2002)
• Cheng J. Lin, Alberto Avritzer, Elaine J. Weyuker, Sai-Lai Lo: Issues in Interoperability and Performance Verification in a Multi-ORB Telecommunications Environment. DSN 2000: 567-575
• Elaine J. Weyuker, Filippos I. Vokolos: Experience with Performance Testing of Software Systems: Issues, an Approach, and Case Study. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 26(12): 1147-1156 (2000)

Today's Book: Capacity Planning for Web Services

While we can find only little research on capacity planning, practioners actually do this. A book by Daniel Menasce et al. gives us a good insight for:

• Web services: protocols, interaction models, and unique performance, reliability, and availability challenges
• State-of-the-art capacity planning methodologies
• Spreadsheets implement the solutions of the models presenteed in the book
• Specific issues and workloads associated with HTTP and TCP/IP protocols
• Benchmarking current performance at system and component levels

• Daniel A. Menasce, Virgilio A.F. Almeida, Capacity Planning for Web Services: Metrics, Models, and Methods, Prentice Hall, Sep 11, 2001

Academic Conference for Wikis

WikiSym 2005, the first symposium on Wikis was held for Oct 16-18, 2005, San Diego, California, USA, co-located with ACM OOPSLA.