The bigwig Project

With the maturity of network technology, the deterministic factor of a 'successful' web site does not as much depend on its connectivity to the Internet, rather the content of web pages plays a more important role. The inclusion of dynamic data, for example, has become an increasingly desirable feature of a web page. Web servers that support dynamic web pages are capable of retrieving data at the time of user requests. Rather than being statically included in the web page, these dynamically retrieved data may physically reside in various file systems or database servers across the Internet.JAVA, a new object-oriented programming language, has become a buzzword since its introduction by Sun Microsystems in 1994 [1, 2, 3]. It was claimed that JAVA, via its ability to embed applets in a web page, would make the content of a web page alive and dynamic. Data and information on a web page can now be updated dynamically when users request them.In this paper, we discuss our experience of developing JAVA applets that use various types of JDBC (JAVA Database Connectivity) drivers to connect to and then manipulate data stored in SQL (Structured Query Language) database servers. We first start with the discussion of general client/server model involving JDBC, and then introducing the procedure of setting up programming projects employing this approach in an undergraduate database course.

Web services allows interaction of versatile applications irrespective of their platform, language and locations by utilizing generic and reliable services that can used as application building block. Business workflows can be implemented using composite web services. As more and more web services are evolving now, choosing the appropriate web service based of the Quality of Service (QoS) metrics is a tedious task now. Among all QoS metrics, reliability plays a vital role. Non-functional metrics of reliability are categorized as availability, performance and interoperability. In this paper, a framework model is proposed to optimize the performance in dynamic composite web service using caching technique.

Web services are changing the way in which the World Wide Web is currently being used. The Web was created originally to support human-to-computer interactions with textual and graphical data. Today, people use the Web to read the latest news, buy consumer goods, search for information, and obtain stock quotes. However, the Web does not yet support effective computer-to-computer interactions between software applications of different enterprises. Web services can enable Internet-based software applications of different enterprises to interact with each other directly by providing application programs with the ability to invoke operations that otherwise would be invoked manually by a human through a browser. Web services can run not only on mainframe computers and server computers, but also on desktop computers and client handsets. Web services allow individuals and organizations to publish links to their software applications, just as they publish links to their Web pages. Web services solve the enterprise application integration (EAI) problem by enabling interaction among different applications within the same organization. They can also enable computer-to-computer applications of different organizations to interact without human intervention. For example, Web services can be used for reservation systems, order-tracking systems, and business supply chains. In the example shown in Figure 1, Company A (a customer) orders goods from Company B (a distributor). Company B checks the availability of the goods from Company C (a supplier), and then arranges for payment and shipping of the goods to Company A without human intervention. Performance, security, and reliability are factors that will limit the use of Web services unless those issues can be properly addressed. Nonetheless, the potential widespread use and benefits of Web services are very compelling. Web services allow disparate computing systems and applications to be coupled together, and they enable enterprises to streamline and automate their business processes.

The absence of benchmarks for Web sites with dynamic content has been a major impediment to research in this area. We describe three benchmarks for evaluating the performance of Web sites with dynamic content. The benchmarks model three common types of dynamic content Web sites with widely varying application characteristics: an online bookstore, an auction site, and a bulletin board. For the online bookstore, we use the TPCW specification. For the auction site and the bulletin board, we provide our own specification, modeled after ebay.com and slahdot.org, respectively. For each benchmark we describe the design of the database and the interactions provided by the Web server. We have implemented these three benchmarks with a variety of methods for building dynamic-content applications, including PHP, Java servlets and EJB (Enterprise Java Beans). In all cases, we use commonly used open-source software. We also provide a client emulator that allows a dynamic content Web server to be driven with various workloads. Our implementations are available freely from our Web site for other researchers to use. These benchmarks can be used for research in dynamic Web and application server design. In this paper, we provide one example of such possible use, namely discovering the bottlenecks for applications in a particular server configuration. Other possible uses include studies of clustering and caching for dynamic content, comparison of different application implementation methods, and studying the effect of different workload characteristics on the performance of servers. With these benchmarks we hope to provide a common reference point for studies in these areas.

To address the challenges of dynamic, distributed and collaborative Web Services (WS) testing, this paper proposes a trustworthy service broker architecture and a dependence-based progressive group testing technique. The new architecture extends the traditional Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) service broker by introducing the check-in and check-out testing interfaces, which are associated with a set of automated tools. The design objectives of the trustworthy service broker are to perform rigorous testing and evaluation effectively and to ensure that only quality WS can be registered and released to the public. A group testing technique is applied to reduce the test cost by using a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated test scripts, which progressively rules out low quality WS. WS are further ranked based on the group testing results using ranking criteria. Experiments show that this approach can effectively test and choose WS in an open environment and in reduced number of tests.

In 1998, Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, together with thirty distinguished experts in high-performance computing and networking, laid the foundations of a new computing model called GRID. Their vision was introduced in the book, The GRID: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure (see review, SCPE Vol. 3, No. 3 ). The editors wrote: … A computational grid is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high-end computational capabilities… allowing new classes of applications to emerge… as yet, we have only a preliminary understanding of what these new applications will look like. Over the next five years, Grid computing became the hottest R&D field. Academia and national labs built experimental infrastructures, new startups were established to develop Grid technologies, and the HPC giant vendors joined the party. Each one pushed in a different direction based on what and how he believed Grid computing should look. It was only a matter of time until people started to ask what the Grid is all about. A survey of ten Grid experts produced ten different answers. The question remains without a clear answer, leaving many people confused. Ian Foster picked up the gloves. In his article, What is the GRID? A three point checklist (GRIDtoday, July 22, 2002: Vol. 1, No. 6), he redefines the Grid model to reflect the trades and changes in the field during the past five years. According to Foster, a Grid is a system that: Coordinates resources that are not subject to centralized control. Uses standard, open, general-purpose protocols and interfaces. Delivers a nontrivial quality of service. But Foster's new definition could not encompass all of the Grid's approaches. Moreover, Foster explained by example what the Grid is not: A cluster management system such as Sun's Sun Grid Engine, Platform's Load Sharing Facility, or Viridian's Portable Batch System can, when installed on a parallel computer or local area network, deliver quality of service guarantees and thus constitutes a powerful Grid resource. However, such a system is not a Grid itself, due to its centralized control of the hosts that it manages Within a week the responses started to come in. The first one was from Wolfgang Gentzsch, Director of Grid computing at Sun Microsystems (GRIDtoday, August 5, 2002: Vol. 1, No. 8). Gentzsch wrote: I very much like Ian's two earlier definitions. Combined, they may provide a very generic Grid definition. The new checklist, however, reduces the potential of a wide and rich variety of Grids, with different architectures, operational models, and applications, and may miss the chance to becoming widely accepted as a standard definition of the Grid. Why do we need a definition for the Grid? Can the Grid be defined? Is a definition is necessary to the Grid's development? The Grid is an open vision and thus cannot be defined. An attempt to define the Grid can only reach the foreseen technology horizon, and this horizon is only one to two years ahead. Grid computing is a paradigm in shift. New architectures and standards are changing the shape and direction of the Grid's development. In the past year one such prominent architecture was Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). The OGSA is the first attempt to bridge the gap between two cyberspace worlds: the Internet and the Grid. The Internet and the Grid are two different computing models. There are people who believe that the Grid is the next generation of the Internet and the World Wide Web, saying that the Great Global Grid is still many years away. Others state that the Grid will complement, not replace, the Internet as we know it. In 1998, when the Grid blueprint was published, a new Internet language appeared called eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XML is a development tool for a new Internet computing model known as Web Services. At that time, nobody understood that there is a relationship between Web Services and the Grid. Three years past before Steve Tuecke from Argonne National Laboratory started to write a spec for Grid Services. Later, people from IBM joined the mission and together they created OGSA. The OGSA specification outlines interfaces to grid computing software that comply with Web Services standards. If adopted, Grid services such as job scheduling, authentication, failure-detection, staging of applications and data, and migration of applications and data, will all be accessed through standard Web Services architecture. OGSA is basically where Grid meets Web Services and maybe the first step towards full integration of the Internet and the Grid. The Internet appeared a decade ago. In the beginning, the Net offered primitive applications: a mailing system, ftp services, and a web of home pages. Nobody asked, What is the Internet? The years passed and new emerging Internet technologies were developed. Today we can talk on the phone over the Net, chat with friends, and video conference with colleagues on the other side of the world. New computing and business models were developed: e-commerce, e-learning, e-science, and e-you-name-it. And nobody asks what the Internet is. The Grid is a super-model, a bag of networking models associated with many types of architectures, software packages, applications, and standards. Today, when people talk about the Grid they mention Data Grids, Science Grids, and Campus Grids. And at the same time they mention Farm computing, Peer-to-peer computing, and Utility computing, among others. Ten years from now many of today's technologies will disappear and new ones will be developed. I don't know how Grid computing will look a decade from now, but I know that we will have g-commerce, g-learning, g-science, and g-chat. Nobody will ask what the Grid is. It will be obvious, just as the Internet is today. Ami Marowka The Computer Aided Design Laboratory School of Engineering and Computer Science Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Web services (WS) is called composite or compound when its execution involves interactions with other WS to utilize their features. The service providers published the web services through the internet as independent software components that are fulfilling the requirements of customer request. Clustering is more necessary for efficient web service discovery and web service composition processes. Clustering process groups the similar type of web services. In this paper, efficient clustering methods such as k-means clustering, Hierarchical agglomerative clustering and Balanced Iterative Reducing and Clustering using Hierarchies (BIRCH) clustering are introduced for web service clustering. The k-means clustering is a kind of partitional clustering where the web pages are divided into subsets with no hierarchy defined over them and the hierarchical agglomerative clustering is a type of hierarchical clustering where the web pages are arranged in tree structure in which leaves represents the data points and nodes denotes the clusters. BIRCH is an integrated hierarchical clustering algorithm uses the clustering features and cluster feature tree for general cluster description. Based on these clustering methods, web pages are clustered which are used for web service discovery and web service composition. The experiments are conducted on number of web services and the efficiency is evaluated in terms of accuracy, precision, recall and run time.

Driven by maturing Web service technologies and the wide acceptance of the service-oriented architecture paradigm, the software industrys traditional business models and strategies have begun to change: software vendors are turning into service providers. In addition, in the Web service market, a multitude of small and highly specialized providers offer modular services of almost any kind and economic value is created through the interplay of various distributed service providers that jointly contribute to form individualized and integrated solutions. This trend can be optimally catalyzed by universally accessible service orchestration platforms service value networks (SVNs) which are the underlying organizational form of the coordination mechanisms presented in this book.Here, the authors focus on providing comprehensive business-oriented insights into todays trends and challenges that stem from the transition to a service-led economy. They investigate current and future Web service business models and provide a framework for Web service value networks. Pricing mechanism basics are introduced and applied to the specific area of SVNs. Strategies for platform providers are analyzed from the viewpoint of a single provider, and so are pricing mechanisms in service value networks which are optimal from a network perspective. The extended concept of pricing Web service derivatives is also illustrated. The presentation concludes with a vision of how Web service markets in the future could be structured and what further developments can be expected to happen.This book will be of interest to researchers in business development and practitioners such as managers of SMEs in the service sector, as well as computer scientists familiar with Web technologies. The books comprehensive content provides readers with a thorough understanding of the organizational, economic and technical implications of dealing with Web services as the nucleus of modern business models, which can be applied to Web services in general and Web service value networks specifically..

Web services technology is the most common implementation of service oriented architecture. Web services are based on open technologies such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and offer a distributed approach for the integration of heterogeneous applications across the internet. The process of combining web services functionalities into one composite service is called web services composition. To perform this task, several languages such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Web Services Flow Language (WSFL) and Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI) have emerged. These languages are based on programming concepts and neglect the specification step which is very important in any software development process. In this paper, we address the formal specification of web services descriptions and the modelling of their composition using the model driven engineering principles. To this end, we propose a domain specific language (DSL) called S-GNet. The proposed DSL introduces new modelling elements which make it well adapted to the web services characteristics. We also propose a graph grammar which transforms Web Services Description Language (WSDL) descriptions into their equivalent S-GNet specifications. This grammar is integrated within an S-GNet modelling tool.

Now a days, everyone is worried about their safety in hazardous environments. In applications ranging from household to industrial environments, monitoring and control has become important. Using the Internet as the common interface, many devices can be controlled. IOT (Internet of Things) monitors and controls the devices using the World Wide Web. In this paper temperature and light intensity are monitored and the devices Fan and light are controlled remotely from a safe distance by using web technology. The monitoring and controlling system uses ARM cortex A9 processor in ZYBO (Zynq Board) as core of the hardware. The Web server application and Linux, both are ported on ARM cortex A9 processor. The GUI (Graphical User Interface) application is designed by using Qt for displaying temperature and light intensity values and for controlling the devices. The sensor control unit sends the sensor data from microcontroller through wireless medium with the help of Zigbee technology to ARM cortex A9 processor. The data from web server is received through HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) and displayed on web page. The temperature and light intensity values are displayed on the monitor and also on the web page. The devices fan and light are controlled remotely from a web page.

Web services – a new breed of self-contained, self-describing, modular applications published, located, and invoked across the Web – handle functions, from simple requests to complicated business processes. They are defined as network-based application components with a services-oriented architecture (SOA) using standard interface description languages and uniform communication protocols. SOA enables organizations to grasp and respond to changing trends and to adapt their business processes rapidly without major changes to the IT infrastructure. The Inaugural International Conference on Next-Generation Web Services Practices (NWeSP'05) attracted researchers who are also the world's most respected authorities on the semantic Web, Web-based services, and Web applications and services. NWeSP'05 was held in cooperation with the IEEE Computer Society Task Force on Electronic Commerce, the Technical Committee on Internet, and the Technical Committee on Scalable Computing. This special issue presents eight papers focused on different aspects of Web services and their applications. Papers were selected based on fundamental ideas and concepts rather than the thoroughness of techniques employed. Papers are organized as follows: <I>Taher et al.</I> present the first paper, on a Quality of Service Information and Computational framework (QoS-IC) supporting QoS-based service selection for SOA. The framework's functionality is expanded using a QoS constraints model that establishes an association relationship between different QoS properties and is used to govern QoS-based service selection in the underlying algorithm. Using a prototype implementation, the authors demonstrate how QoS constraints improve QoS-based service selection and save consumers valuable time. Due to the complex infrastructure of web applications, response times perceived by clients may be significantly longer than desired. To overcome some of the current problems, <I>Vilas et al.</I>, in the second paper, propose a cache-based extension of the architecture that enhances the current web services architecture, which is mainly based on program-logic or protocol-dependent optimization. In the third paper, Jo and Yoo present authorization for securing XML sources on the Web. One of the disadvantages of existing access control is that the DOM tree must be loaded into memory while all XML documents are parsed to generate the DOM tree, such that a lot of memory is used in repetitive search for tree to authorize access to all nodes in the DOM tree. The complex authorization evaluation process required thus lowers system performance. Existing access control fails to consider information structure and semantics sufficiently due to basic HTML limitations. The authors overcome some of these limitations in the proposed model. In the fourth paper, Jung and Cho propose a novel behavior-network-based method for Web service composition. The behavior network selects services automatically through internal and external links with environmental information from sensors and goals. An optimal service is selected at each step, resulting in a globally optimal service sequence for achieving preset goals. The authors detail experimental results for the proposed model by comparing them with rule-based system and user tests. <I>Kong et al.</I> present an efficient method in the fifth paper for merging heterogeneous ontologies – no ontology building standard currently exists – and the many ontology-building tools available are based on different ontology languages, mostly focusing on how to create, edit and infer the ontology efficiently. Even ontologies about the same domain differ because ontology experts hold different view points. For these reasons, interoperability between ontologies is very low. The authors propose merging heterogeneous domain ontologies by overcoming some of the above limitations. In the sixth paper, Chen and Che provide polynomial-time tree pattern query minimization algorithm whose efficiency stems from two key observations: (i) Inherent redundant "components" usually exist inside the rudimentary query provided by the user, and (ii) nonedundant nodes may become redundant when constraints such as co-occurrence and required child/descendant are given. They show that the algorithm obtained by first augmenting the input tree pattern using constraints, then applying minimization, invariably finds a unique minimal equivalent to the original query. Chen and Che present a polynomial-time algorithm for tree pattern query (TPQ) minimization without XML constraints in the seventh paper. The two-part algorithm is a dynamic programming strategy for finding all matching subtrees within a TPQ. The algorithm consists of one for subtree recognization and a second for subtree deletion. In the last paper, <I>Bagchi et al.</I> present the mobile distributed virtual memory (MDVM) concept and architecture for cellular networks containing server-groups (SG). They detail a two-round randomized distributed algorithm to elect a unique leader and co-leader of the SG that is free of any assumption about network topology, and buffer space limitations and is based on dynamically elected coordinators eliminating single points of failure. As guest editors, we thank all authors featured in this special issue for their contributions and the referees for critically evaluating the papers within the short time allotted. We sincerely believe that readers will share our enjoyment of this special issue and find the information it presents both timely and useful.

Googling for Health Information

The Web, as we know it, is a collection of human readable pages that are virtually unintelligible to computer programs. For that reason, it has been called the “eyeball” Web. While the Web emerged as a World Wide repository of digitized information, by and large, the very same information is not available for automatic computation. In recent years two parallel efforts emerged that have the potential of overcoming this paradox: the first effort is the Semantic Web which provides the tools for the explicit markup of the content of Web pages; the second effort is the development of Web Services which results in a Web where programs act as independent agents to become the producers and consumers of information and enable automation of business transactions.In this talk I will focus on research that attempts to bridge the gap between the Web as we know it, the Semantic Web and Web services. Under this approach, I propose the vision of Web services as autonomous goal-directed agents which select other agents to interact with, and flexibly negotiate their interaction model, acting at times in client server mode, or at other times in peer to peer mode. The resulting Web services, that I call Autonomous Semantic Web services, utilize ontologies and semantically annotated Web pages to automate the fulfillment of tasks and transactions with other Web agents. In particular, Autonomous Semantic Web services use the Semantic Web to support capability based discovery and interoperation at run time. A first step towards this vision is the development of formal languages and inference mechanisms for representing and reasoning with core concepts of Web services. DAML-S (the Darpa Agent Markup Language for Services) is the first attempt to define such a language. I will give a brief overview of DAML-S and its relations with the Semantic Web and Web services. In addition, I will provide concrete examples of computational models of how DAML-S can be viewed as the first step in bridging the gap between the Semantic Web and current proposed industry standards for Web services. I will provide concrete examples of DAML-S in action, discuss challenges still open in the bridging between the Semantic Web and Web services and provide a roadmap to get us from today’s Web to the Web of autonomous Semantic Web services.KeywordsFormal LanguageCore ConceptDigitize InformationAutomatic ComputationBusiness TransactionThese 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.

The classic web applications usually need a lot of bandwidth to provide the rich user interfaces. Since Ajax [8] was introduced, it has reduced the web server load and the data transfer to/from users' computers. By using Ajax, only a specific part in the web page can be requested to the web server [6]. However, it still cannot provide the real time data updating. The common approach to provide the real time data updating uses a timer to request a new data from the web server periodically [3, 4]. But, the requests sometimes do not get any new data. If the interval time to renew the data is too long, the data updating will come to the client late and some data received by the client may be lost. The proposed approach to solve the problem is creating an Ajax application which can receive a signal from the web server. The received signal will trigger the web application to renew the data from the web server. By limiting of requests to the web server only if a new data in the web server arises, as a consequence the traffic between the web server and the client can be reducible. The efficiency of web traffic will be measured by two matrices, the successful receptive percentage of the web application request to the web server and the bandwidth consumption of web application. In this research, an innovation of Green Ajax will be proposed. The idea of low bandwidth and low resource consumption are introduced. Mozilla Firefox and Firebug will be employed as the tools to measure the experimental results. From the experiments, the expected results of this research achieve 80% of the successful receptive percentage of the web application requests, no data loss percentage, and reduce 80% of bandwidth consumption.

We look at a number of policies for managing a file system cache in a Web server. Traces from NCSA World Wide Web (WWW) server are used in this study. We study several caching policies for improving the overall performance of such a server and show that request response time can be improved by some of the replacement policies that take size of the request into account. It is shown that least frequently used (LFU) performs well when cache sizes are small (<16 MB) and SpacexAge replacement policy performs consistently better than LRU. We show that previously proposed cache sharing policies improve performance significantly in clustered Web servers.