Integrating Databases, Search Engines and Web Applications: A Model-Driven Approach

Due to problems in correctly understanding user requirements the Information System (IS) development community have recognised the need to involve end-users in the development and maintenance of web applications. End-users perceive web applications through user interfaces (UIs) and commonly use sketches of UIs to express their requirements. Thus, it would be desirable to provide an end-user development methodology centred on UI modelling techniques. In this paper a visual modelling approach is presented to empower end-users in developing data intensive web applications starting from user interface descriptions. The modelling language follows a holistic approach by representing both static and behavioural information of a web application in one visual model. The visual model allows the specification of the look-and-feel of the application through mock-ups, and the user interactions through links, annotations, and widget references. End-users are guided during the modelling process by providing a summary view to manage the design of complex applications and a data model view to improve the quality of the generated applications.

Significant effort is currently invested in application integration, enabling business processes of different companies to interact and form complex multiparty processes. Web service standards, based on WSDL (Web Service Definition Language), have been adopted as process-to-process communication paradigms. However, the conceptual modeling of applications using Web services has not yet been addressed. Interaction with Web services is often specified at the level of the source code; thus, Web service interfaces are buried within a programmatic specification.In this article, we argue that Web services should be considered first-class citizens in the specification of Web applications. Thus, service-enabled Web applications should benefit from the high-level modeling and automatic code generation techniques that have long been advocated for Web application design and implementation. To this end, we extend a declarative model for specifying data-intensive Web applications in two directions: (i) high-level modeling of Web services and their interactions with the Web applications which use them, and (ii) modeling and specification of Web applications implementing new, complex Web services.Our approach is fully implemented within a CASE tool allowing the high-level modeling and automatic deployment of service-enabled Web applications.

The goal of disseminating and manipulating spatial knowledge over the Internet, has led to the development of Web applications, known as Web Geographic Information Systems (Web GIS). Web GIS can be considered as a particular class of data-intensive Web applications, since they are mainly devoted to handle (spatial) information to and from the user. The success of WebML (Web Modeling Language) for designing traditional data-intensive web applications suggested use to extend this visual formalism to model relevant interaction and navigation operations typical of Web GIS. In the paper, we describe the proposed extension and provide an example of its application.

With the fast growing of the Internet and its Web users all over the world, how to manage and discover useful patterns from tremendous and evolving Web information sources become new challenges to our data engineering researchers. Also, there is a great demand on designing scalable and flexible data mining algorithms for various time-critical and data-intensive Web applications. In this paper, we purpose a new clustering model for generating and maintaining clusters efficiently which represent the changing Web user patterns in Websites. With effective pruning process, the clusters can be fast discovered and updated to reflect the current or changing user patterns to Website administrators. This model can also be employed in different Web applications such as personalization and recommendation systems.

Current data-intensive Web applications, such as on-line trading, e-commerce, corporate portals and so on, are becoming more and more complex, both in terms of density of information and in terms of navigational paths. At this aim different techniques have been proposed in literature for optimizing the information to be shown to the user. In this paper we present a technique for tuning the amount of data presented to the user, directly inspired to the concept of Levels of Details (LoD), commonly used in computer graphics. Like in computer graphics the idea is to simplify the original model, without loosing the main characteristics of the objects to be shown. The approach is based on the application of LoD operators to the compositional and navigational structure of a Web application, expressed through an hypertextual model.KeywordsAccess ModalityAccess PathIncoming LinkDetail ConceptNavigational PathThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In this paper, a self-designed model is put forward, in which a web application architecture interrelates with a self-designed classification-based image-retrieval search algorithm for electronic commerce grocery stores. This developed model for reference is named as “Search Images”. The architecture of this model is designed in two segments—primarily the designing of convolutional neural network (CNN) and secondarily combining the CNN model with web application segment. Dataset of vegetables and fruits is used to train the CNN model also pre-processing, data augmentation, plots of training and testing of the model are obtained before assessing the accuracy of the designed model. Precise accuracies of the CNN model are obtained. This developed model makes use of a forward-thinking technological method which automatically classifies and retrieves the picture of desired vegetable and fruit commodity on the web application with the assistance of this designed visual-image search engine. This advanced visual search engine eradicates the requirement of manual grocery search in the web application. This model can classify 131 classes of fruits and vegetables based on the selected dataset. This paper encompasses the methodology and description for designing this search engine applying visual-image classifier.KeywordsImage processingVisual-image searchObject recognitionClassification algorithmConvolutional neural networkVegetables classifierFruits classifier

Search is the most heavily used web application in the world and is still growing at an extraordinary rate. Understanding the behaviors of web search engines, therefore, is becoming increasingly important to the design and deployment of data center systems hosting search engines. In this paper, we study three search query traces collected from real world web search engines in three different search service providers. The first part of our study is to uncover the patterns hidden in the query traces by analyzing the variations, frequencies, and locality of query requests. Our analysis reveals that, contradicted to some previous studies, real-world query traces do not follow well-defined probability models, such as Poisson distribution and log-normal distribution. The second part of our study is to deploy the real query traces and three synthetic traces generated using probability models proposed by other researchers on a Nutch based search engine. The measured performance data from the deployments further confirm that synthetic traces do not accurately reflect the real traces. We develop an evaluation tool that can collect performance metrics on-line with negligible overhead. The performance metrics include average response time, CPU utilization, Disk accesses, and cycles-per-instructions, etc. The third of our study is to compare the search engine with representative benchmarks, namely Gridmix, SPECweb2005, TPC-C, SPECCPU2006, and HPCC, with respect to basic architecture-level characteristics and performance metrics, such as instruction mix, processor pipeline stall breakdown, memory access latency, and disk accesses. The experimental results show that web search engines have a high percentage of load/store instructions, but have good cache/memory performance. We hope those results presented in this paper will enable system designers to gain insights on optimizing systems hosting search engines.

There has been widespread interest in the development and application of the World Wide Web (WWW) to support decision-making activities in product design and manufacture. An increasing number of web applications are emerging and a large number of practitioners are trying these web-based decision support systems. In the meantime, it becomes increasingly difficult to surf for appropriate web applications on the Internet using general-purpose search engines. This paper describes a web site, WAPIP, that has been developed specifically to support new product introduction activities. It provides databases for software vendors and researchers to register their web applications with the WAPIP search engine. It also provides facilities to support practitioners in product design and manufacture to search rapidly for the web applications that are suitable for solving their problems. This paper discusses the various issues regarding the design, development and operation of this WAPIP search engine.

A framework defined as a structure thatsupports the development of dynamic websites, web applications, and services. Framework code and design are often reusable to assist customization, resource service, and API-related tasks. This study discussed current practice to help a developer understand PHP frameworks adoption for web application development. Three approaches were selected to understand the features suitability of the PHP frameworks: the systematic approach, score criteria evaluation, and PHP framework technical factors. A comparison of 23 different frameworks features also has been studied that involves features such as ORM, Code Generator, Template Engine, and CRUD Generator. Besides PHP framework features, understanding the basic core PHP to build web application would help a lot in learning PHP frameworks. Moreover, new developers should not limit themselves to a particular PHP framework only but also allow themselves to explore various PHP frameworks in the development of web application projects.

Most people in the industrial world use a wide variety of web applications daily with the majority being insecure and vulnerable. This gives hackers the opportunity to steal data from the user’s web application, which may contain sensitive information. Vulnerability detection may be conducted by a rigorous penetration test. A penetration tester’s duty is to define and exploit the web applications’ vulnerabilities.This paper describes a technique for automatic vulnerable web application generation application. Firstly, the prepared web application is sent to the tool to create the vulnerable web application version. This tool does this by the injection of Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Cross Site Scripting (XSS) into the web application. Different variant vulnerabilities may be injected too, so different methods are needed, in order to exploit vulnerabilities dependent on the variant. One of the tool’s tasks is to produce web applications, which will be used to train the penetration testers.

This chapter demonstrates how high-level code is automatically generated for multi-core processors. The code generation capability of the Verifiable Embedded Real-Time Application Framework (VERTAF) was extended to support multi-core processors in the new VERTAF/Multi-Core (VMC) framework for embedded systems. After users specify embedded software requirements via SysML models along with parallel task, parallel data, and parallel dataflow specifications, the code generator automatically generates parallel code. Using the digital video recording (DVR) system as a case study, we show the correctness and advantages of the VMC code generator. The main inputs of VMC code generator include the block definition diagrams, state machine diagrams, and requirement diagrams of the system to be designed. The proposed code generation in VMC not only significantly decreases the amount of manually-written code, but also provides a formal procedure for model-conforming code generation of multi-core embedded software.

Falconer is a semantic Web search engine enhanced SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) application, which is designed to demonstrate the ability of accelerating the creation and reuse process of semantic Web data with easy-to-use user interfaces. In this process, semantic Web search engines feed existing semantic data into the SIOC framework, where new semantic data are composed by the community and indexed again by those search engines. Compared to existing social (semantic) Web applications, Falconer inherently conforms to SIOC specification. It provides semantic search engine based user registration suggestion, friends auto-discovery, and semantic annotation for forum post content. Another distinctive feature is that it enables users to subscribe any resource having a URI as the topic they are interested in. The relationships among users, topics, and posts are further visualized for analyzing the topic trends in the community. As all semantic data are formatted in RDF and RDFa, they can be queried with SPARQL query language.

In today’s mobile-driven world, organizations face the challenge of adapting legacy Web applications to pervasive information systems, such as mobile applications, ensuring seamless accessibility across devices. This paper presents a systematic, three-phase approach to reengineering Web applications into mobile applications: Reverse-engineering, Transformation, and Forward-engineering. In the reverse-engineering phase, high-level conceptual models of the Web application are generated to capture its architecture and functionality. During the transformation phase, these models are refined using Unified Modeling Language (UML) profiles to align with the requirements of mobile systems. The forward-engineering phase utilizes the Acceleo technology, along with predefined mapping rules and code patterns, to automate the generation of mobile application code. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework, revealing a significant reduction in manual effort throughout the reengineering process. This approach offers a scalable and efficient solution for transforming Web applications into mobile applications, contributing to advancements in model-driven engineering and software reengineering.

A code generator is a program being able to generate code based on an input specification. Such programs are written to automate repetitive work, but also when a system needs to instantiate textual representations of a model, like HTML pages in web applications. Code generators are a subclass of metaprograms; the set of programs analyzing or manipulating other programs. A code generator can be written in an ad-hoc fashion or using sophisticated methodologies from compiler research.KeywordsCode GeneratorObject LanguageAbstract SyntaxConcrete SyntaxOutput CodeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)1 Research Premises and HypothesisMaintenance costs have a consistent weight in the total costs generated by an application during its entire lifecycle. Previously conducted research and studies that focus on software maintenance support this claim. In [2], the 60/60 rule of software is depicted. The rule claims that maintenance accounts for 60% of the total costs generated by a software in its entire lifecycle. Enhancement or perfective [3] maintenance tasks account for 60% of all the costs generated by maintenance [2], whereas error correction or corrective [3] maintenance tasks account only for 17% of total maintenance costs [2]. In [4] it's stated that software applications evolve over time to meet the changing needs which leads to maintenance generating 67% of the applications total lifecycle costs. In [5] it is argued that maintenance typically accounts for 75% or more of the total software workload. Other relevant research place maintenance costs at 90% [6], 75% [7], 90% [8] or at 60% to 70% [9] of the overall application's lifecycle cost. It is therefore of paramount importance to accurately estimate maintenance cost before implementing a software project in order to better comprehend the total costs associated with developing and owing a software application. Better understanding maintenance costs will provide valuable information regarding resource planning and the appropriate time to decommission the application.The cost of maintenance is directly determined by the number of people involved in the maintenance process and the number of hours each person invests in the maintenance tasks. Thus in order to estimate maintenance cost one needs to estimate the effort invested in the maintenance process. The maintenance effort is expressed in man-hours which entails the number of ours dedicated by the maintenance team to implementing maintenance tasks. Maintenance in web applications has two main components: content maintenance and technical maintenance.Content maintenance requires performing tasks of a non-technical nature like updating product inventory and information, adding news or articles, managing blog posts, updating contact or brand and visual identity information and moderating user comments or messages. Content maintenance team staffing and therefore content maintenance effort is determined by the web application's size [1].According to [1] and as presented in Table 1, content maintenance cost is determined by the number of hours required to keep the web application up to date in terms of content. The larger the application the more hours need to be invested in keeping it up to date in terms of content. The more content changes in an application the more technical maintenance tasks are generated. Technical maintenance tasks are generated because content managers spot bugs or request new functionality to help keep the content up to date. Therefore, content update frequency is a factor that impacts maintenance effort and cost.Technical maintenance requires adding new functionality, performing regular back-ups, monitoring website outages, checking IP reputation, checking DNS configuration, test website speed, check for broken links, perform software updates if third party software was used when developing the web application, monitor traffic statistics and review search engine indexing.According to [1] and as presented in Table 2, technical team stuffing is determined by the level of complexity built into the web application. Thus, a Basic web application which is characterized by static content build mainly using front-end technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript will require no more than 1 person to perform maintenance tasks. A Dynamic web application which stores its content in a database and has functionality which is powered by PHP, Java, ASP.NET, Python, Ruby or any other high-level programming language will require 1 to 2 persons to perform maintenance tasks. …