Web Service Applications Research Articles

Æminium

The aim of ÆMINIUM is to study the implications of having a concurrent-by-default programming language. This includes language design, runtime system, performance and software engineering considerations. We conduct our study through the design of the concurrent-by-default ÆMINIUM programming language. ÆMINIUM leverages the permission flow of object and group permissions through the program to validate the program's correctness and to automatically infer a possible parallelization strategy via a dataflow graph. ÆMINIUM supports not only fork-join parallelism but more general dataflow patterns of parallelism. In this paper we present a formal system, called μÆMINIUM, modeling the core concepts of ÆMINIUM. μÆMINIUM's static type system is based on Featherweight Java with ÆMINIUM-specific extensions. Besides checking for correctness ÆMINIUM's type system it also uses the permission flow to compute a potential parallel execution strategy for the program. μÆMINIUM's dynamic semantics use a concurrent-by-default evaluation approach. Along with the formal system we present its soundness proof. We provide a full description of the implementation along with the description of various optimization techniques we used. We implemented ÆMINIUM as an extension of the Plaid programming language, which has first-class support for permissions built-in. The ÆMINIUM implementation and all case studies are publicly available under the General Public License. We use various case studies to evaluate ÆMINIUM's applicability and to demonstrate that ÆMINIUM parallelized code has performance improvements compared to its sequential counterpart. We chose to use case studies from common domains or problems that are known to benefit from parallelization, to show that ÆMINIUM is powerful enough to encode them. We demonstrate through a webserver application, which evaluates ÆMINIUM's impact on latency-bound applications, that ÆMINIUM can achieve a 70% performance improvement over the sequential counterpart. In another case study we chose to implement a dictionary function to evaluate ÆMINIUM's capabilities to express essential data structures. Our evaluation demonstrates that ÆMINIUM can be used to express parallelism in such data-structures and that the performance benefits scale with the amount of annotation effort which is put into the implementation. We chose an integral computationally example to evaluate pure functional programming and computational intensive use cases. Our experiments show that ÆMINIUM is capable of extracting parallelism from functional code and achieving performance improvements up to the limits of Plaid's inherent performance bounds. Overall, we hope that the work helps to advance concurrent programming in modern programming environments.

The evolution of identity management using the example of web-based applications

Abstract The typical identity management (IdM) techniques used in web-based applications are about to change from application-specific means for identification, authentication and authorization towards the support of standardized, secure and privacy friendly mechanisms for Single Sign-On (SSO). In this paper we outline the different phases of this evolution, which started with the introduction of standardized interfaces for authentication and authorization and allowed to shift these sensitive tasks from the application towards the web application server. In a second phase the interfaces were extended to support authentication and authorization in distributed systems and feature SSO-techniques. The third phase adds identification and aims at providing more security for distributed authentication infrastructures and finally there is a trend towards providing more privacy friendly mechanisms for identity management in the future.

Metadata and provenance for spatial analysis: the case of spatial weights

Within a CyberGIS environment, the development of effective mechanisms to encode metadata for spatial analytical methods and to track the provenance of operations is a key requirement. Spatial weights are a fundamental element in a wide range of spatial analysis methods that deal with testing for and estimating models with spatial autocorrelation. They form the link between the data structure in a GIS and the spatial analysis methods. Over time, the number of formats for spatial weights implemented in software has proliferated, without any standard or easy interoperability. In this paper, we propose a flexible format that provides a way to ensure interoperability within a cyberinfrastructure environment. We illustrate the format with an application of a spatial weights web service, which is part of an evolving spatial analytical workbench. We describe an approach to embed provenance in spatial weights structures and illustrate the performance of the web service by means of a number of small experiments.

Study on Quality of Service Based on Trusted Computing

Trusted computing is a hot topic of information security technology research nowadays. It was developed based on computing and Information Systems. At the same time, business processes for e-commerce and Web service applications, suppliers and customers define a binding agreement or contract between the two parties, specifying quality of service (QoS) items such as products or services to be delivered, deadlines, quality of products, and cost of services. The management of QoS metrics directly impacts the success of organizations participating in e-commerce. In this paper, we discuss the present situation about QoS in the environment of trusted computing. It describes the factors related to each attribute, as well as possible tradeoffs and existing efforts to achieve that quality. The paper also discusses key issues in services level agreements that are used to contract the level of services quality between service providers and users.

Kelayakan Raspberry Pi sebagai Web Server: Perbandingan Kinerja Nginx, Apache, dan Lighttpd pada Platform Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is a small-sized computer, but it can function like an ordinary computer. Because it can function like a regular PC then it is also possible to run a web server application on the Raspberry Pi. This paper will report results from testing the feasibility and performance of running a web server on the Raspberry Pi. The test was conducted on the current top three most popular web servers, which are: Apache, Nginx, and Lighttpd. The parameters used to evaluate the feasibility and performance of these web servers were: maximum request and reply time. The results from the test showed that it is feasible to run all three web servers on the Raspberry Pi but Nginx gave the best performance followed by Lighttpd and Apache. Keywords: Raspberry Pi, web server, Apache, Lighttpd, Nginx, web server performance

Evaluating Web Services Functionality and Performance

Traditional distributed database transaction applications within large organizations often involve a large number of resources. In this case, people and DDBMSs distributed over a wide geographic area, may introduce conflict between heterogeneous systems. Web services (WS) provide solution for this problem since WS have an independent platform, independent language, and independent object model. This work presents WS application to access heterogeneous and distributed database via horizontal data fragments that is designed to be reliable, flexible and scalable. It describes the setup of SOAP server and applications based on the SOAP for end user client. In addition, it allows the publishing of WS descriptions to submit user requests (goal) to retrieve the required information. Here we evaluate the functional, behavior and performance of WS among possible different alternatives with real-time and execution parameters. Implementation details and case study experiments are presented along with the corresponding results.

Characterizing the scalability of a Web application on a multi‒core server

SUMMARYThe advent of multi‒core technology motivates new studies to understand how efficiently Web servers utilize such hardware. This paper presents a detailed performance study of a Web server application deployed on a modern eight‒core server. Our study shows that default Web server configurations result in poor scalability with increasing core counts. We study two different types of workloads, namely, a workload with intense TCP/IP related OS activity and the SPECweb2009 Support workload with more application‒level processing. We observe that the scaling behaviour is markedly different for these workloads, mainly because of the difference in the performance of static and dynamic requests. While static requests perform poorly when moving from using one socket to both sockets in the system, the converse is true for dynamic requests. We show that, contrary to what was suggested by previous work, Web server scalability improvement policies need to be adapted based on the type of workload experienced by the server. The results of our experiments reveal that with workload‒specific Web server configuration strategies, a multi‒core server can be utilized up to 80% while still serving requests without significant queuing delays; utilizations beyond 90% are also possible, while still serving requests with ‘acceptable’ response times. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Æminium

Writing concurrent applications is extremely challenging, not only in terms of producing bug-free and maintainable software, but also for enabling developer productivity. In this article we present the Æminium concurrent-by-default programming language. Using Æminium programmers express data dependencies rather than control flow between instructions. Dependencies are expressed using permissions, which are used by the type system to automatically parallelize the application. The Æminium approach provides a modular and composable mechanism for writing concurrent applications, preventing data races in a provable way. This allows programmers to shift their attention from low-level, error-prone reasoning about thread interleaving and synchronization to focus on the core functionality of their applications. We study the semantics of Æminium through μ Æminium, a sound core calculus that leverages permission flow to enable concurrent-by-default execution. After discussing our prototype implementation we present several case studies of our system. Our case studies show up to 6.5X speedup on an eight-core machine when leveraging data group permissions to manage access to shared state, and more than 70% higher throughput in a Web server application.

String deduplication for Java-based middleware in virtualized environments

To increase the memory efficiency in physical servers is a significant concern for increasing the number of virtual machines (VM) in them. When similar web application service runs in each guest VM, many string data with the same values are created in every guest VMs. These duplications of string data are redundant from the viewpoint of memory efficiency in the host OS. This paper proposes two approaches to reduce the duplication in Java string in a single Java VM (JVM) and across JVMs. The first approach is to share string objects cross JVMs by using a read-only memory-mapped file. The other approach is to selectively unify string objects created at runtime in the web applications. This paper evaluates our approach by using the Apache DayTrader and the DaCapo benchmark suite. Our prototype implementation chieved 7% to 12% reduction in the total size of the objects allocated over the lifetime of the programs. In addition, we observed the performance of DayTrader was maintained even under a situation of high density guest VMs in a KVM host machine.

Behavior-consistent service substitutions in dynamic environments

In this paper, a novel approach for service substitutions based on the service type in terms of its interface type and behavior semantics is proposed. In order to analyze and verify behavior-consistent service substitutions in dynamic environments, we first present a formal language to describe services from control-flow perspective, then introduce a type and effect system to infer conservative approximations of all possible behaviors of these services. The service behaviors are represented by concurrent behavior expressions (CBEs). Built upon the interpretation of CBEs, behavior-consistent service substitutions are defined and analyzed by subtyping technology. The correctness of the analysis approach is guaranteed by type safety theorem, which is mechanically proved in the Coq proof assistant. Finally, applications in web services show that our method is effective and feasible.

Research and Application of the Beijing Road Traffic Prediction System

As an important part of the urban Advanced Traffic Management Systems (ATMS) and Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS), short-term road traffic prediction system has received special attention in recent decades. The success of ATMS and ATIS technology deployment is heavily dependent on the availability of timely and accurate estimation or prediction of prevailing and emerging traffic conditions. We studied a real-time road traffic prediction system developed for Beijing based on various traffic detection systems. The logical architecture of the system was presented, including raw data level, data processing and calculation level, and application level. Four key function servers were introduced, namely, the database server, calculation server, Geographic Information System (GIS) server, and web application server. The functions, function modules, and the data flow of the proposed traffic prediction system were analyzed, and subsequently prediction models used in this system are described. Finally, the prediction performance of the system in practice was analyzed. The application of the system in Beijing indicated that the proposed and developed system was feasible, robust, and reliable in practice.

Blog in web application: a software engineering perspective

Blogs are being extensively integrated in web applications, to facilitate communication and interaction with the users. Usually, freely available blog software is adapted and integrated into web application, with blog software being installed on web application server or server of blog software provider. Even though several blog software exist for integration, academically, there is no mention of requirement specification or design document for blog software for use during integration. Since not all the features are relevant for the user, there is a need for some kind of mechanism, so that, the user can identify the features that are to be included in blog software, during integration. In this paper, we present for blog software in web application: 1) a design; 2) weighted requirement checklists. The design helps the developer during creating and updating of blog software. The logical view of design displays interaction of entities and sub-entities with actors. For easing requirement selection for user, a weighted requirement checklist is presented here. A metric, software estimation, is defined for quantifying selected requirements. A case study of freely available blog software is presented to which estimation and design is applied.

The SAMS: Smartphone Addiction Management System and Verification

While the popularity of smartphones has given enormous convenience to our lives, their pathological use has created a new mental health concern among the community. Hence, intensive research is being conducted on the etiology and treatment of the condition. However, the traditional clinical approach based surveys and interviews has serious limitations: health professionals cannot perform continual assessment and intervention for the affected group and the subjectivity of assessment is questionable. To cope with these limitations, a comprehensive ICT (Information and Communications Technology) system called SAMS (Smartphone Addiction Management System) is developed for objective assessment and intervention. The SAMS system consists of an Android smartphone application and a web application server. The SAMS client monitors the user's application usage together with GPS location and Internet access location, and transmits the data to the SAMS server. The SAMS server stores the usage data and performs key statistical data analysis and usage intervention according to the clinicians' decision. To verify the reliability and efficacy of the developed system, a comparison study with survey-based screening with the K-SAS (Korean Smartphone Addiction Scale) as well as self-field trials is performed. The comparison study is done using usage data from 14 users who are 19 to 50 year old adults that left at least 1 week usage logs and completed the survey questionnaires. The field trial fully verified the accuracy of the time, location, and Internet access information in the usage measurement and the reliability of the system operation over more than 2weeks. The comparison study showed that daily use count has a strong correlation with K-SAS scores, whereas daily use times do not strongly correlate for potentially addicted users. The correlation coefficients of count and times with total K-SAS score are CC = 0.62 and CC =0.07, respectively, and the t-test analysis for the contrast group of potential addicts and the values for the non-addicts were p = 0.047 and p = 0.507, respectively.

A method for facilitating end-user mashup based on description

The development of mashup technology has allowed people to more efficiently create web applications with existing information drawn from the web. However, not every mashup developer can use any given web source in a mashup. There are two technological problems. First, it is not always possible to reuse a given source. There are web applications and web services, two kinds of sources. The traditional way of reusing web services is to write a program. Relevant and applicable approaches are needed in order to reuse web applications. Second, it must be possible for users without programming knowledge to reuse an existing web source. In this paper, we propose an effective approach that allows end-users to build mashup applications with almost any part(s) of web applications and REST web services without programming. Our approach supports the more flexible transfer of information between components, which can be achieved via a web application or REST web service.

Management Information System of Open Laboratory Based on ASP and SQL Server in Manufacturing Engineering

ASP is located in a server-side scripting running environment, through this kind of environment, the user will be able to create and run dynamic interactive Web server application, such as interactive dynamic Web page, Web information processing, Web database access and so on. Analysis of the ASP technology and access the characteristics of WEB database, this paper introduces the working principle of ASP and ASP built-in objects and components, and emphasizes to discuss the ASP database access components ADO, based on this, gives the realization with ASP WEB database access to the application example in manufacturing engineering.

A loosely coupled architecture for automatic composition of web services applications

Semantic web research aims to provide mechanisms to combine several web services to offer a new value-added service that satisfies the user's request. A number of methods and tools have been proposed for this purpose. However, none of these approaches offers a complete solution from the standpoint of a decoupled, inter-organisational, domain-independent and ready for use by end users who do not have an in-depth technical knowledge. To overcome these limitations, this paper provides a loosely coupled architecture to develop applications based on web services composition, in which architectural modules can be integrated in different ways, ranging from inter-organisational sources, which support different levels of automation and composition methods, to diverse application domains. We described the input and output requirements for each module and implemented the following decoupled modules: interface for non-technical users, translator using the ANTLR tool, composer using a hierarchical planner and executor based on workflows.

Fuzzy-based Clustering of Web Services’ Quality of Service: A Review

Clustering has been proposed in numerous researches on web services due to its ability in enhancing computational efficiency. The objective of this paper is to present a review on web services clustering and to propose fuzzy clustering of web services' based on quality of service (QoS). A total of 49 manuscripts, collected from ISI, SCOPUS and Google Scholar indexing databases, were critically reviewed. The review revealed that there is no report has been published before regarding fuzzy-based clustering of web services' QoS. It also revealed the importance of clustering in ensuring the efficiency of web services delivery particularly in their discovery, selection and recommendation processes. The results of the proposed fuzzy clustering can be used as reference to guide requestors to subscribe suitable services. They could also be implemented as the inference components for fuzzy- based web services applications. For future work, the generated clustering results will be implemented in web services QoS monitoring application. Index Terms—Clustering, fuzzy clustering, Fuzzy C-Means, QoS clustering, web services clustering.

A lightweight software fault‐tolerance system in the cloud environment

SummaryWith the development of cloud computing, the demand of high availability for services is growing. Unfortunately, software failures greatly reduce system availability. This paper presents a lightweight software fault‐tolerance system, called SHelp, which can effectively recover programs from many types of software bugs in the cloud environment. With error virtualization techniques, it proposes ‘weighted’ rescue points techniques to effectively survive software failures through bypassing the faulty path. For multiple application instances running on different virtual machine, a three‐level storage hierarchy with several comprehensive cache updating algorithms for rescue points management is adopted to share error handling information. On the one hand, SHelp can reduce the redundancy for multiple application instances; on the other hand, it can more effectively and quickly recover from faults caused by the same bugs. A Linux prototype is implemented on an open‐source virtual machine monitor platform, Xen, and evaluated using four Web server applications that contain various types of bugs. The experimental results show that SHelp can recover server applications from these bugs in just a few seconds with modest performance overhead. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A unified biological modeling and simulation system for analyzing biological reaction networks

In order to understand the biological response in a cell, a researcher has to create a biological network and design an experiment to prove it. Although biological knowledge has been accumulated, we still don’t have enough biological models to explain complex biological phenomena. If a new biological network is to be created, integrated modeling software supporting various biological models is required. In this research, we design and implement a unified biological modeling and simulation system, called ezBioNet, for analyzing biological reaction networks. ezBioNet designs kinetic and Boolean network models and simulates the biological networks using a server-side simulation system with Object Oriented Parallel Accelerator Library framework. The main advantage of ezBioNet is that a user can create a biological network by using unified modeling canvas of kinetic and Boolean models and perform massive simulations, including Ordinary Differential Equation analyses, sensitivity analyses, parameter estimates and Boolean network analysis. ezBioNet integrates useful biological databases, including the BioModels database, by connecting European Bioinformatics Institute servers through Web services Application Programming Interfaces. In addition, we employ Eclipse Rich Client Platform, which is a powerful modularity framework to allow various functional expansions. ezBioNet is intended to be an easy-to-use modeling tool and a simulation system for understanding the control mechanism by monitoring the change of each component in a biological network. The simulation result can be managed and visualized on ezBioNet, which is available free of charge at http://ezbionet.sourceforge.net or http://ezbionet.cbnu.ac.kr.

Detection of Cross-Site Scripting Attack under Multiple Scenarios

Web-application attacks are considered to be one of the major security concerns of a large number of applications, especially those deployed in health care, banking and e-business operations. These applications must involve high security in addition to other application requirements such as friendliness, effectiveness and efficiency in service provided to the end users. In this paper, we focus on security vulnerabilities resulting from generic input validation problems that may cause cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. We take a look at the types of XSS attacks and current practices for their detection and identify the research issues and challenges. We propose a method for the detection of XSS attacks. The detection method identifies a malicious execution sequence based on the initialized list of—legitimate execution sequences and malicious strings or malicious literals generated during a training phase. The initialized lists are stored into four different Web-Application Execution Profiles (WAEPs) corresponding to four different attack scenarios. The detection module searches the run-time sequence in the respective WAEPs. We test our method for the detection of three different categories of XSS attacks under four different attack scenarios—two in the client side and two in the web-application server. Satisfactory results have been found under all the four scenarios.