Today's Paper: Using XForms to Simplify Web Programming

An XForms-based programming model for web applications, HopiXForms (HX), is presented.
It allows multi-targetting of applications.
An XForms processor is essentially a virtual machine that interprets a well-defined, declarative specification language for forms.

Richard Cardone, Danny Soroker, Alpana Tiwari, Using XForms to Simplify Web Programming, In Proc. of WWW 2005, Chiba, Japan, May10-14, 2005.

A pdf file is available from:
http://www2005.org/cdrom/docs/p215.pdf

Title:
Using XForms to Simplify Web Programming
Abstract:
The difficulty of developing and deploying commercial web
applications increases as the number of technologies they use
increases and as the interactions between these technologies
become more complex. This paper describes a way to avoid this
increasing complexity by re-examining the basic requirements of
web applications. Our approach is to first separate client concerns
from server concerns, and then to reduce the interaction between
client and server to its most elemental: parameter passing. We
define a simplified programming model for form-based web
applications and we use XForms and a subset of J2EE as enabling
technologies. We describe our implementation of an MVC-based
application builder for this model, which automatically generates
the code needed to marshal input and output data between clients
and servers. This marshalling uses type checking and other forms
of validation on both clients and servers. We also show how our
programming model and application builder support the
customization of web applications for different execution targets,
including, for example, different client devices.

"Web-Serviced" Lotus Notes

I am using Lotus Notes in my office. Though it is very useful, especially with its rich UI and replication facility, it is sometimes not easy for me to reuse existing information or functionality in Lotus Notes DBs. Lotus Domino's rich functionality in customizing servers may allow to do this, it is better to support Web Service, that is, providing services with published WSDL and using standard protocols like SOAP/HTTP.

Is there any way to do this? The new version of Lotus Notes/Domino may be a solution.

• New features in Lotus Notes and Domino Designer 7.0, Dick McCarrick, IBM developerWorks, Aug 30, 2005.
  

• Lotus Notes/Domino 7 Web Services, by Robert Perron, IBM developerWorks, Sep 27, 2004.
  

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)