3198403
Supporting reconfigurable object distribution for customized web applications
In current practice, Web applications are tightly coupled with the platforms that a particular service provider intends to support and the execution scenario envisioned at the design time. The resulting applications do not adapt well to all clients and runtime execution contexts. The goal of our research is to develop methods and software to support recon-figurable distributed applications which can be customized to specific requirements. We view a Web application as a composition of actors, i.e. distributed active objects, and apply techniques of generative programming to develop a virtual application framework which separates the logic of objects from aspects relevant to object distribution on different platforms. We describe ActorSpec, a specification system allowing programmers to express desired object distribution and assisting application generators to produce highly customized versions of an application. The resulting flexibility facilitates the development of customizable Web applications on an increasingly complex Web infrastructure.
14604279
Towards Context-Aware Web Applications
In order to guarantee certain levels of QoS, a Web application needs to adapt itself to different execution contexts. However, because of the lack of coordination support in Web platforms, service providers respond to the challenge by simply providing multiple versions of a Web application, one for each context. We argue this top-down approach is neither efficient nor scalable: developing a context-specific application requires considerable effort and expertise while the ever-changing Internet never stops generating interesting contexts which can be exploited for better deployment. As an alternative, we propose a three-layer, bottomup approach to building context-aware Web applications. At the bottom layer, we characterize a context-specific Web application with a particular component distribution plan which provides details for composing individual objects. In the middle layer, recursively defined configurations provide a bridge which relates high-level context features to low-level component distribution properties, where a configuration is a combination of configurations and/or component distribution properties. At the top level, a context management system selects desirable configurations according to the execution contexts.
16065953
An adaptive programming framework for Web applications
Web applications service a gamut of users with a mix of static and dynamic resources: requests come from different devices running different Web agents (typically, Web browsers) with different capabilities. In a majority of such interactions, services are embedded in an HTML page and displayed on a Web browser. Consequently, Web application development has been tightly coupled with the platforms that a particular site intends to support; application developers have been asked to decide "where to run what" at design time to develop services using location-specific technologies and interweave them with static resources. Such difficulties stem from lack of adequate infrastructural support for platform-agnostic development and deployment framework. This paper presents the design and implementation of a framework for Web application development which hides the heterogeneity of the Internet and the underlying interaction model. It has been meticulously designed such that it is non-intrusive and requires little change to the existing Web infrastructure. The framework is built on top of a programming model that provides a uniform view across different platforms and thus hides the heterogeneity and distributivity of the Internet. Adaptive deployment involves placement specification and compiler translation. The uniformity gives rise to rapid prototyping and development, thereby reducing costs and improving productivity. The adaptiveness enables QoS aware service provisioning.
9754165
Generation of Fuzzy Due-date Assignment Rules