A Description-based Approach to Mashup of Web Applications, Web Services and Mobile Phone Applications

The purpose of this paper is to present a description based mashup approach for integration of mobile applications, Web services, and Web applications in order to realize cooperation of mobile devices. We define a description language called C-MAIDL for describing logic of mashup. We use a mashup generator for generating mashup applications from the description. We aim to allow composition of existing mobile applications, extracted information from Web pages and RESTful Web services. We use a mashup execution environment to automate cooperation among devices. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach allows users to create mobile mashup applications dealing with cooperation of devices easily and efficiently.KeywordsMobile MashupCooperation MashupDescription Language

Developments of mobile mashup applications have a rapid growth in the recent years. We present a development of Mobile Application Interface Description Language (MAIDL) and its applications. The language enables the development of mobile mashup applications with less programming efforts. Using our description language, composers are able to reuse existent mobile applications, Web services, and Web applications as the components to create a mashup mobile application or a Tethered Web service on a mobile device (TeWS). We demonstrate the further application of a TeWS to deliver a cooperative mashup via a functionality exchange between an Android and an iOS device.

The Web environment is a distributed, dynamic, and large information repository which has now evolved to encompass various information resources accessible worldwide. Organizations across all spectra have already moved their main operations to the Web which has realized a fast growth in various Web applications. This has dramatically increased the need to build a fundamental infrastructure for efficient deployment and access of Web applications. As the Web applications have evolved, the complexity involved in designing, developing, managing and maintaining these applications have also increased remarkably. This scenario has led to the emergence of a new discipline towards the end of last decade known as Web Engineering. The essence of Web engineering consists in successfully managing the diversity and complexity of Web application development where web services have become more flexible as to independent by support mobile devices to access web services at any time, and place. In this context mobile web access is currently being hyped as the alternative for both mobile devices and web services. Moreover easily readable mobile web services, the complexity to realize security increases further. Hence it is necessary to build security mechanisms for hosting and accessing web services through mobile devices.

The objective of medical information systems is to enhance the efficiency of the medical process, especially as it relates to patient interaction with the health care system. Due to the development of Web service technology and the spread of mobile devices, mobile Web services have become an essential element of ubiquitous healthcare. However, there are few applications currently based on mobile Web services. This paper proposes a system for supplying Web services on medical information on a wired/wireless network according to using resources of device. When a mobile device requires Web services, mobile context server rewrites and offers the equivalent contents provided from the Web server to suit the required device's resources. This system services the same medical information data after its recomposition according to the network and devices of user. This paper describes the prototype of a wired/wireless integrated medical information system using Web services and mobile Web services as the basis of a ubiquitous healthcare system.

The developments in the web services domain, the improved device capabilities of the smart phones, the increased transmission rates of the cellular networks and the ubiquity of the wifi networks have lead to the mobile web services (MWS). In MWS domain, the resource constrained smart phones can act as both web service clients and providers (Mobile Host), thus forming a Mobile Enterprise. Simultaneously, with the advent of cloud computing, mobiles tried to utilize cloud services which, most often, provide web service interfaces. The benefits of offloading tasks to the cloud include extended battery lifetime, improved storage capacity and increased processing power, for the mobile devices. This paper summarizes the research associated with mobile web and cloud services. The QoS aspects of the Mobile Host, like providing proper security and scalability, the discovery of the provided services, the integrational aspects of the different technological solutions and their migration to the cloud are thoroughly discussed. The paper also discusses Mobile Cloud Middleware (MCM), which eases the invocation of multiple cloud services from mobiles. MCM raises the necessity for an asynchronous notification mechanism and with the Mobile Host feature; this is as simple as providing one more service from the device.

One of the interesting aspects of the Web 2.0 'evolution' is the wide-availability of various Web applications as APIs or Web services. These APIs expose informational services on the Web and take many forms of remote invocation of functions using standard Web protocols and XML for data representations, e.g., REST, SOAP/WSDL, XML-RPC, and other approaches. The services (or APIs) are also usually accompanied by user facing Web applications for human-consumption. Canonical examples are Google Maps, Yahoo! Flykr and del.icio.us, EVDB's Eventful's application and API, Amazon.com's S3, ECS, Alexa, and many others. The Ruby programming language and its Rails framework are ideal for programming Web applications and services in the Web 2.0. Ruby's modern and dynamic features make it an excellent language for rapid prototyping and integration of various Web services. Rails' superb support for rapid Web application development, database access, and AJAX, make it well suited for creating front-ends and back-ends to the next generation of Web applications and services. In this tutorial we will take a hands-on deep-dive into the Ruby and Rails platform and learn how they can be used to: (1) create Web applications backed by a relational database, (2) consume Web services, (3) create and deploy APIs or Web services, and (4) mashup of existing Web services and applications. No a priori knowledge of Ruby or Rails is required - although some programming in a modern OO language and Web application development are definite plus.

Security issues have become a major issue on the Internet. One of the security methods that are widely used today is to implement a digital certificate. Digital certificates have evolved over time, one of which is the X.509 digital certificate. Digital certificates have been widely used as authentication applications, web network authentication and other authentication systems that require digital certificates. This research is carried out by implementing an X.509 digital certificate technology as a mobile web service with its client. Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), Diffie-Hellman, and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are used to secure the data exchange transaction between the web service and mobile phone. SHA algorithm will be used for user authentication, Diffie-Hellman algorithm will be used for public key exchange and AES algorithms will be used for symmetric cryptography data. The results of the application of digital certificates, the SHA algorithm, Diffie-Hellman, and AES in mobile phone applications, provide security application running on web service. Index Terms”Digital Certificate, X.509, SHA, Diffie Hellman, AES

Over the last decades, Internet has grown dramatically. As a result of this growth, a huge amount of Web services and applications have emerged to fulfill consumer’s requirements. At the same time, the mobile network industry has become ubiquitous as most consumers are now inseparable from their mobile terminals. The combination of mobile technology and web services provides new paradigm called mobile web services. In order to find services fulfilling the client’s requirement, a discovery mechanism is needed. However, discovering services from devices is still a significant challenge due to terminal constraints such as screen resolution, smaller memory, CPU, mobility of consumers and the lack of service descriptions. Thus, the challenge is to increase the accuracy of the relevant discovered services that meet the user’s need. In this paper, we present MobiDisc, our mobile web service discovery approach.

Mashup combines information or functionality from two or more existing Web sources to create a new Web page or application. The Web sources that are used to build mashup applications mainly include Web applications and Web services. The traditional way of building mashup applications is using Web services by writing a script or a program to invoke those Web services. To help the users without programming experience to build flexible mashup applications, we propose a mashup approach of Web applications in this paper. Our approach allows users to build mashup applications with existing Web applications without programming. In addition, with our approach users can transfer information between Web applications to implement consecutive query mashup applications. This approach is based on the information extraction, information transfer and functionality emulation methods. Our implementation shows that general Web applications can also be used to build mashup applications easily, without programming.

Web Services (WSs) are gaining worldwide popularity due to reliable and fast intercommunication services for the development of web and mobile applications. WSs are provided to client application developers through web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), such as YouTube API, Twitter API, Facebook API, etc. Due to the popularity of WSs, the developers frequently discuss various WSs-based application’ issues on online forums, such as Stack Overflow (SO). This study aims to highlight the problems faced by client developers in the development process of WSs-based applications using the dataset of SO. The comprehension of developers’ conversations on SO can give insight into the frequency, difficulty, and popularity of different WSs-related problems of developers. We downloaded 12,746 posts from SO relevant to WSs-related issues for this article. We used the topic modeling technique (LDA) to extract various topics from the SO dataset. The topics are labeled and organized into categories and sub-categories according to relationships among them. The difficulty and popularity of each topic have been analyzed. Our investigation yield several findings. First, developers focus on six topics related to WSs on SO: Client APIs development, Data Processing, Web services Authorization, Framework Support, Web APIs, and Mobile Applications. Secondly, the advantages and disadvantages of web applications topic (Fused_Popularity=0.39), from the Clients APIs development category have the highest prevalence, followed by Database (DB) and Data Processing in Applications topic (Fused_Popularity=0.38) from the Data Processing category. Third, most WSs-related topics in all categories are evolving promptly on SO, i.e., new questions are added daily about WSs development, deployment, and authorization. Fourth, the questions of type “how” are primarily asked in Framework support, Client APIs development, and Web APIs categories. Although, many questions in other categories are of the kind “What”. It is also observed that WSs developers not only used SO to ask How and What types of questions but they also used SO to ask information-seeking questions (i.e., in Data processing and Client APIs development categories). Fifth, the topics relevant to Web APIs (Fused_Popularity=10.8) and Client API Development ((Fused_Popularity=9.35) categories of WSs are very popular on SO. Sixth, the questions relevant to the Web APIs (Fused_Difficulty =3) & Client APIs development (Fused_Difficulty=2.25) categories are more difficult than the other four categories. The results of our research may be helpful for the following WSs stakeholders: WSs Client application developers, WSs Educators, and WSs researchers. The WSs Educators and investigators can get more knowledge of new methods and discover novel techniques to make challenging WSs topics easy to understand. WSs framework developers can utilize our extracted WSs topics and categories to know the preferences of WSs developers that may support them in upgrading existing frameworks or developing new ones.

Peeking and Testing Broken Object Level Authorization Vulnerability onto E-Commerce and E-Banking Mobile Applications

In recent years, more and more users use the handheld devices such as smartphone to access the Internet. Users can get their data from the Internet or update their status to the hot social networking Web sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook and MySpace). These popular social networking Web sites usually provide the API (Application Programming Interface). Developers can use these APIs to rebuild a new Web site or a mobile phone application. The REST (Representational State Transfer) scheme is most famous architecture style to call these APIs. Despite there are already exist friendly mobile version Web sites. Users can use mobile Web browser to access these hot social networking Web sites or others. But there are many advantages in using mobile phone applications to access these Web sites through the RESTful APIs they provide. For example, mobile phone applications have fantastic UI and they can integrate with the mobile phone operation system such as open-source Android platform. Developers can develop a RESTful client application to avoid to download entire HTML or Javascript files that will cause many network traffics. But RESTful APIs also have overhead in transmission. In this thesis, we observed the overhead between mobile phone applications and RESTful APIs in low-bandwidth wireless network. We proposed a system architecture to reduce these transmission overheads. And then, speed up the response time and decrease the total transmission bytes.

Recently, the study of mobile mashup has become important in mobile computing. Mashup approaches were proposed to allow users to create mashup for mobile devices. However, existing approaches still lack attention to enable mashup for cooperation of mobile devices. We present a description-based mashup construction approach for cooperation of mobile devices. Our approach allows end-users to create mobile mashup applications by integrating mobile applications, Web applications and Web services. We define a mashup description language for describing logic of mashup. We use a mashup generator to simplify mashup construction. We also present a mashup execution environment to automate information sharing for cooperation of mobile devices.KeywordsMobile mashupCooperation mashupDescription language

Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM) has been associated with a plethora of maternal and neonatal comorbidities as well as adverse pregnancy outcomes. Evidence supports that identifying women with GDM and tight controlling of blood glucose (BG) levels are the fundamental steps for an effective management and prevention of risks associated with GDM. Recent advances in mobile phone applications have shown that they may offer personalized health care services, improve patient's care, independence and self-management as well as enhance patient's compliance to BG monitoring and treatment. Our aim was to identify and appraise main mobile phone applications that were evaluated by published clinical studies. Therefore, mobile applications that were accepted and deployed by healthcare providers, mainly hospitals, such as MobiGuide (Spain), Pregnant+ (Norway) and GDm-Health (UK) were reviewed herein.

Safety plans have been suggested as an intervention for people at risk of suicide. Given the impulsive character of suicidal ideation, a safety plan in the format of a mobile phone application is likely to be more available and useful than traditional paper versions. The study describes MYPLAN, a mobile phone application designed to support people at risk of suicide by letting them create a safety plan. MYPLAN was developed in collaboration with clinical psychiatric staff at Danish suicide preventive clinics. The mobile application lets the user create an individualized safety plan by filling in templates with strategies, actions, and direct links to contact persons. MYPLAN was developed in 2013 and is freely available in Denmark and Norway. It is designed for iPhone and android platforms. As of December 2015, the application has been downloaded almost 8,000 times. Users at risk of suicide as well as clinical staff have provided positive feedback on the mobile application. Support via mobile phone applications might be particularly useful for younger age groups at risk of suicide as well as in areas or countries where support options are lacking. Yet, it is important to examine the effectiveness of this type of intervention.