Component-based Platform Research Articles

MDAPlatform: A Component-based Platform for Constructing and Assessing miRNA-disease Association Prediction Methods

Background: Increasing evidence has indicated that miRNA-disease association prediction plays a critical role in the study of clinical drugs. Researchers have proposed many computational models for miRNA-disease prediction. However, there is no unified platform to compare and analyze the pros and cons or share the code and data of these models. Objective: In this study, we develop an easy-to-use platform (MDAPlatform) to construct and assess miRNA-disease association prediction method. Methods: MDAPlatform integrates the relevant data of miRNA, disease and miRNA-disease associations that are used in previous miRNA-disease association prediction studies. Based on the componentized model, it develops different components of previous computational methods. Results: Users can conduct cross validation experiments and compare their methods with other methods, and the visualized comparison results are also provided. Conclusion: Based on the componentized model, MDAPlatform provides easy-to-operate interfaces to construct the miRNA-disease association method, which is beneficial to develop new miRNA-disease association prediction methods in the future.

FCM: a component-based platform with explicit support of crosscutting and dynamic features

Dealing with crosscutting and dynamic features in component software is a longstanding problem primarily due to the nature of used components: components may be available only as black box software units and their implementations may be protected against alteration. Aspect-orientation provides a valuable means to deal with crosscutting features in different paradigms. Unfortunately, existing endeavours to integrate aspects into component software have several limitations such as the lack of suitable design of aspects and the absence of proper aspect runtime weaving mechanisms. This paper proposes a new component platform to tackle these limitations. In the proposed platform, components and aspects are first-class entities that remain separated from design to implementation. In addition, aspects can be added and removed at runtime. We developed a tool support for the platform in Java. The viability of our proposal is validated through the development of an Airport Wireless Access as a case study.

FCM: a component-based platform with explicit support of crosscutting and dynamic features

Dealing with crosscutting and dynamic features in component software is a longstanding problem primarily due to the nature of used components: components may be available only as black box software units and their implementations may be protected against alteration. Aspect-orientation provides a valuable means to deal with crosscutting features in different paradigms. Unfortunately, existing endeavours to integrate aspects into component software have several limitations such as the lack of suitable design of aspects and the absence of proper aspect runtime weaving mechanisms. This paper proposes a new component platform to tackle these limitations. In the proposed platform, components and aspects are first-class entities that remain separated from design to implementation. In addition, aspects can be added and removed at runtime. We developed a tool support for the platform in Java. The viability of our proposal is validated through the development of an Airport Wireless Access as a case study.

The theranostic nanoagent Mo2C for multi-modal imaging-guided cancer synergistic phototherapy.

Multifunctional theranostic platforms, especially single component-based platforms, enable both cancer treatment and real-time imaging as well as enhance the efficiency of treatment. In this study, 50 nm Mo2C nanospheres were explored as a "one-for-all" theranostic agent. The light-harvesting of Mo2C covered the entire near infrared region, and NIR irradiation concurrently triggered hyperthermia and reactive oxygen species (ROS) production; thus, synergistic outcomes of photothermal and photodynamic therapy could be realized. Both in vitro and in vivo experiments have confirmed the superiority of the synergistic phototherapy in killing cancer cells and removing solid tumors; moreover, Mo2C proposed herein has been proven to be applicable as a photoacoustic imaging and CT imaging contrast agent for in vivo tumor depiction; furthermore, Mo2C demonstrates excellent biocompatibility, showing minimal hematotoxicity and tissue toxicity. A theoretical simulation performed by density functional theory revealed that the metallic character and the interband/intraband transition of Mo2C accounted for its broad photoabsorption. The antitumor mechanism of Mo2C was investigated on a solid tumor by B-mode ultrasonography (US) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), revealing a typical liquefactive necrosis process; hence, herein, the dual-imaging guided phototherapy was efficiently mediated by Mo2C.

A Component-Based Approach for Securing Indoor Home Care Applications.

eHealth systems have adopted recent advances on sensing technologies together with advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) in order to provide people-centered services that improve the quality of life of an increasingly elderly population. As these eHealth services are founded on the acquisition and processing of sensitive data (e.g., personal details, diagnosis, treatments and medical history), any security threat would damage the public’s confidence in them. This paper proposes a solution for the design and runtime management of indoor eHealth applications with security requirements. The proposal allows applications definition customized to patient particularities, including the early detection of health deterioration and suitable reaction (events) as well as security needs. At runtime, security support is twofold. A secured component-based platform supervises applications execution and provides events management, whilst the security of the communications among application components is also guaranteed. Additionally, the proposed event management scheme adopts the fog computing paradigm to enable local event related data storage and processing, thus saving communication bandwidth when communicating with the cloud. As a proof of concept, this proposal has been validated through the monitoring of the health status in diabetic patients at a nursing home.

SoCloud: a service-oriented component-based PaaS for managing portability, provisioning, elasticity, and high availability across multiple clouds

Multi-cloud computing is a promising paradigm to support very large scale world wide distributed applications. Multi-cloud computing is the usage of multiple, independent cloud environments, which assumed no priori agreement between cloud providers or third party. However, multi-cloud computing has to face several key challenges such as portability, provisioning, elasticity, and high availability. Developers will not only have to deploy applications to a specific cloud, but will also have to consider application portability from one cloud to another, and to deploy distributed applications spanning multiple clouds. This article presents soCloud a service-oriented component-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) for managing portability, elasticity, provisioning, and high availability across multiple clouds. soCloud is based on the OASIS Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard in order to address portability. soCloud provides services for managing provisioning, elasticity, and high availability across multiple clouds. soCloud has been deployed and evaluated on top of ten existing cloud providers: Windows Azure, DELL KACE, Amazon EC2, CloudBees, OpenShift, dotCloud, Jelastic, Heroku, Appfog, and an Eucalyptus private cloud.

Modeling Autonomous Systems

Middleware designed to describe sensing, control, and computational communications of components within unmanned systems enables the creation of clean interfaces between the low-level mechanics of such systems and the higher-level logic designed to control them. This paper presents a modeling environment with a domain-specific ontology for autonomous systems, capable of generating software necessary for intercomputer communications according to existing autonomous systems middleware standards. Metamodels are used to specify the domain-specific modeling language to model the messages used, the interfaces between components, and some of the functionality of the components that transmit and receive messages. The generated code supports the high data rates expected in autonomous systems that use lossy message compression. Tests for the messaging infrastructure are also generated for the messages. Also, using this research, this code generation process can be extended to any component-based platform with a similar ontology. The case study and test environment for the software generated by this project is an autonomous ground vehicle, modeled on a Ford Escape Hybrid and used in laboratory experiments.

An experience report on the verification of autonomic protocols in the cloud

Cloud applications are often complex distributed applications composed of multiple software components running on separate virtual machines. Setting up, (re)configuring, and monitoring these applications are complicated tasks because a software application may depend on several remote software and virtual machine configurations. These management tasks involve many complex protocols, which fully automate these tasks while preserving application consistency as well as some key properties. In this article, we present two experiences we had in formally specifying and verifying such protocols. The first one aims at designing a reconfiguration protocol of a component-based platform, intended as the foundation for building robust dynamic systems. The second aims at automating the configuration task of a set of virtual machines running a set of interconnected software components. Both applications are specified using the LNT process algebra and verified using the CADP verification toolbox. The use of formal specification languages and tools was a success. We conclude with a number of lessons we have learned while working on this topic in the last 3 years.

Static vulnerability detection in Java service-oriented components

Extensible component-based platforms allow dynamic discovery, installation and execution of components. Such platforms are service-oriented, as components may directly interact with each other via the services they provide. Even robust languages such as Java were not designed to handle safe code interaction between trusted and untrusted parties. Dynamic installation of code provided by different third parties leads to several security issues. The different security layers adopted by Java or component-based platforms cannot fully address the problem of untrusted components trying to tamper with other components via legitimate interactions. A malicious component might even use vulnerable ones to compromise the whole component-based platform. Our approach identifies vulnerable components in order to prevent them from threatening services security. We use static analysis to remain as exhaustive as possible and to avoid the need for non-standard or intrusive environments. We show that a static analysis through tainted object propagation is well suited to detect vulnerabilities in Java service-oriented components. We present STOP, a Service-oriented Tainted Object Propagation tool, which applies this technique to statically detect those security flaws. Finally, the audit of several trusted Apache Felix bundles shows that nowadays component-based platforms are not prepared for malicious Java interactions.

Dependency solving: A separate concern in component evolution management

Maintenance of component-based software platforms often has to face rapid evolution of software components. Component dependencies, conflicts, and package managers with dependency solving capabilities are the key ingredients of prevalent software maintenance technologies that have been proposed to keep software installations synchronized with evolving component repositories. We review state-of-the-art package managers and their ability to keep up with evolution at the current growth rate of popular component-based platforms, and conclude that their dependency solving abilities are not up to the task.We show that the complexity of the underlying upgrade planning problem is NP-complete even for seemingly simple component models, and argue that the principal source of complexity lies in multiple available versions of components. We then discuss the need of expressive languages for user preferences, which makes the problem even more challenging.We propose to establish dependency solving as a separate concern from other upgrade aspects, and present CUDF as a formalism to describe upgrade scenarios. By analyzing the result of an international dependency solving competition, we provide evidence that the proposed approach is viable.

Large Scale Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Femtosecond Laser Ablation of Silicon Using Sensing-VISICOM

Silicon is widely used as substrate material for the fabrication of micro-electro and micromechanical components. Since silicon is very brittle, how to cut it into complex shapes remains a hot topic. Thanks to the small spot diameter, laser cutting is a promising alternative. However, during laser cutting, different kinds of defects can be generated depending on the beam-material interaction phenomena (ablation, melting, etc). Molecular Dynamics simulation is an effective way to study the beam-material interaction phenomena. Lots of work has been done to develop MD models of laser ablation of silicon. However, due to lack of support from high performance parallel simulation platform, the scale of the molecular systems is limited. This paper presents a component-based parallel simulation platform Sensing-VISICOM, for large scale molecular dynamics simulation. To test its runtime performance, a molecular system of femtosecond laser ablation of silicon is designed and implemented under Sensing-VISICOM. The results of the simulation show the platform can scales well to millions of atoms.

AutoHome

This article introduces the design of the AutoHome service-oriented framework to simplify the development and runtime adaptive support of autonomic pervasive applications. To this end, we describe our novel open infrastructure for building and executing home applications. This includes the amalgamation of the two computing areas of autonomics and service orientation, to produce a component-based platform providing facilities including monitoring, touchpoints, and other common autonomic services. This infrastructure uniquely blends the advantages of distributed autonomic control with global conflict management in a management hierarchy. We discuss this platform in terms of pervasive home systems and show how one would develop such a system for two examples of automated home applications: intruder detection and medical support, respectively. Both applications were built within our framework and evaluated showing that the use of the framework introduces minimal overheads but provides many benefits. We then conclude by highlighting the contributions of AutoHome and a discussion about the lessons learned, limitations, and future research directions.

XMem

Developers commonly build contemporary enterprise applications using type-safe, component-based platforms, such as J2EE, and architect them to comprise multiple tiers, such as a web container, application server, and database engine. Administrators increasingly execute each tier in its own managed runtime environment (MRE) to improve reliability and to manage system complexity through the fault containment and modularity offered by isolated MRE instances. Such isolation, however, necessitates expensive cross-tier communication based on protocols such as object serialization and remote procedure calls. Administrators commonly co-locate communicating MREs on a single host to reduce communication overhead and to better exploit increasing numbers of available processing cores. However, state-of-the-art MREs offer no support for more efficient communication between co-located MREs, while fast inter-process communication mechanisms, such as shared memory, are widely available as a standard operating system service on most modern platforms. To address this growing need, we present the design and implementation of XMem ? type-safe, transparent, shared memory support for co-located MREs. XMem guarantees type-safety through coordinated, parallel, multi-process class loading and garbage collection. To avoid introducing any level of indirection, XMem manipulates virtual memory mapping. In addition, object sharing in XMem is fully transparent: shared objects are identical to local objects in terms of field access, synchronization, garbage collection, and method invocation, with the only difference being that sharedto-private pointers are disallowed. XMem facilitates easy integration and use by existing communication technologies and software systems, such as RMI, JNDI, JDBC, serialization/XML, and network sockets. We have implemented XMem in the open-source, productionquality HotSpot Java Virtual Machine. Our experimental evaluation, based on core communication technologies underlying J2EE, as well as using open-source server applications, indicates that XMem significantly improves throughput and response time by avoiding the overheads imposed by object serialization and network communication.

A Component-Based Platform for Accessing Context in Ubiquitous Computing Applications

Based upon a conceptual model for ubiquitous computing systems, this article presents a component-based platform for building context-aware applications. This platform introduces a high-level service to abstract context and to allow the rapid construction of dynamically reconfigurable applications. Moreover, the inputs and outputs of context components benefit from a strong typing, which permits design-time checks that can detect specification mistakes. At the end of the article, we introduce an implementation for this platform.

Using P2P, GRID and Agent technologies for the development of content distribution networks

Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) have recently emerged as an innovative technology to improve the efficiency of static, time-dependent, and rich media content delivery atop large-scale IP-based networks. Apart from network technology advances, the design and implementation of robust and efficient CDNs in large-scale computing environments call for paradigms and software technologies which are able to support the core functionalities of CDNs, namely distribution, management, discovery, and delivery of content. Agent, GRID, and P2P computing paradigms and technologies have already demonstrated their suitability in supporting the development of high-performance systems over large-scale, dynamic, and heterogeneous environments. Therefore the combined use of all three paradigms and technologies which are characterized by dynamism, robustness, and intelligence, is expected to increase the effectiveness and boost the efficiency of future CDNs. In this paper, we present UPGRADE-CDN, an experimental component-based platform which jointly uses P2P, GRID, and Agent based mechanisms for client request redirection, CDN monitoring, and content delivery.

Integrating Web technologies in Eclipse

In this paper we describe an approach and an implementation for integrating Web technologies in Eclipse, a Java-and component-based platform. First, we support embedding of UI (user interface) artifacts that are developed using either widget or markup technologies. Second, we provide support for DOM (Document Object Model) programming. We implement this approach by bridging the relevant foundation technologies-COM (Component Object Model) and XPCOM (Cross Platform Component Object Model)--which allows us to embed the engines of the two major browsers, Internet Explorer and Mozilla®. We discuss several possible applications of this work, such as seamless access to online help systems and Web-based development of administrative tools.

A Framework for Dynamically Configurable and Reconfigurable Network-based Multimedia Adaptations

The recent advances in mobile equipments and wireless communications are making the Internet more and more heterogeneous. Terminals vary in their network capacities (bandwidth, latency, etc.), hardware capacities (CPU, memory, screen size, etc.) and in their software capacities (data formats, communications protocols, etc.). On the other hand, this evolution adds to the dynamic nature of the Internet, where resources vary unexpectedly. Thus, providing an efficient access to multimedia services requires that multimedia data be adapted according to each terminal capacity. One approach to this issue is based on the use of intermediate nodes to perform such adaptations (media transformations, protocol conversion, and data transcoding). In this area, there has been much research work for tackling the various forms of heterogeneity. However, less attention has been paid to the dynamic configuration and the reconfiguration at run-time of such mechanisms. This paper addresses these two aspects and describes a framework for network-based adaptations in multimedia streaming applications. This framework relies on a language, named APSL (Adaptation Proxy Specification Language), allowing the specification of network-based adaptation processes and their mn-time behavior. The translation of this language is based on a component-based platform offering basic multimedia-related functionalities; composed dynamically in order to build an arbitrary configuration. Also, reconfigurations are facilitated through high-level component-related operations. This paper describes the architecture of the framework and shows through experimental evaluation the benefits of run-time reconfiguration.

컴포넌트 상호작용 명세기법

컴포넌트 기반 플랫폼이 갖는 주 한계점은 컴포넌트 기반 시스템이 갖는 컴포넌트간 상호작용과 관련된 행위에 대한 기술과 추론에 대한 적당한 수단을 제대로 제공하지 못한다는 것이다. 현 컴포넌트 기반 플래폼이 CORBA의 IDL과 같은 컴포넌트에 대한 시그네쳐 수준에서의 기술을 위한 방법을 제공하기는 하지만, 이는 컴포넌트들간 상호작용과 같은 행위 기술을 저 수준에서 제공하는 것에 불과하다 컴포넌트 기반 시스템에서 중요한 과제 중 하나는 바로 컴포넌트들간 상호작용과 같은 행위를 기술하는 것과 이를 바탕으로 행위에 대한 검증이 필요하다. 본 논문에서는 프로세스 대수를 이용하여 컴포넌트 인터페이스의 명세 정의와 추상화된 소프트웨어 아키텍처를 어떻게 만족시킬 것인가를 보장받기위한 role의 결합방법, 생성된 아키텍처에 대한 전개규칙, 시각화방법을 연구한다. 또한 사례연구를 통해 본 논문에서 제안한 명세기법 및 정의의 타당함을 보였다. A major limitation of available component-based platforms Is that they do not provide suitable means for describing and reasoning on the concurrent behaviour of interacting component-based system. Indeed while these platforms provide convenient ways to describe the typed signatures of components, e.g. like CORBA's IDL, they offer a quite low-level support to describe the concurrent behaviour of component. The ability to describe and verify the concurrent behaviour of interacting components is key aspect In the development of large component-based software system. This study propose a component interface specification using process algebra and configuration's role which allows one to prove correctness of software architecture generated at design level as well as to define compatibility relations by our evolution rule and <TEX>$\pi$</TEX>-graph. Also, we shown on an appropriateness of a specification techniques and definitions proposed in this paper by case-study.

Architectural and functional design and evaluation of e-learning VUIS based on the proposed IEEE LTSA reference model

A comparative analysis is presented of the architectural and functional design of e-learning delivery platforms and applications, e-learning course authoring tools, and learning management systems (LMSs), with a view of assessing how their functionality meets the requirements of a comprehensive e-learning Virtual University Information System (VUIS). The reference model used as a basis for the comparative analysis is the Layer 3 (system components) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Learning Technology Standards Committee's (LTSC) P1484.1/D9, 2001-11-30 Draft Standard for Learning Technology— Learning Technology Systems Architecture (LTSA) (chap. 20), with some modified version thereof. The modification proposed is considered appropriate and necessary so as to more accurately reflect the architectural and functional attributes of existing products and also to better reflect, and contribute to, the authors' own vision for the architectural and functional design of an effective VUIS structure [Ganchev, I., O'Droma, M., & McDonnell, F. (2002). Component-based platform for a Virtual University Information System. In V. Mladenov (Ed.), Recent Advances in Computers, Computing and Communications (pp. 185–190). Electrical and Computer Engineering Series of Reference Books and Textbooks (ISBN 960-8052-62-9). WSEAS Press; O'Droma, M., Ganchev, I., Stojanov, St., & McDonnell, F. (2002, April 1–9). UML design approach to a Virtual University Information System. Proceedings of 13th Annual EAEEIE Conference, B-7, York, UK (ISBN 1-85911-008-8).]. A novel comparative performance evaluation methodology is proposed and used to reflect the capabilities of 10 commercially available e-learning systems back onto the modified IEEE LTSA reference model and onto a proposed novel major functional classes (MFCs) model developed as an aid to a VUIS design. The results demonstrate the strengths and the inadequacies of existing products, as gauged from the products' “demo” models and from published literature (i.e., product reviews, others). The comparative evaluation exercise is useful also in that it implicitly draws out in a systematic and detailed way, a range of strengths and attributes one would like to see in the architectural and functional design of a minimal comprehensive VUIS.

From problem to solution with quality attributes and design aspects

It is commonly accepted that quality attributes shape the architecture of a system. There are several means via which the architecture can support certain quality attributes. For example, to deal with reliability the system can be decomposed into a number of fault containment units, thus avoiding fault propagation. In addition to structural issues of architecture, qualities also influence architectural rules and guidelines, such as coding standards. In this paper we will focus on design aspects as a means of supporting quality attributes. An example of a design aspect is error handling functionality, which supports reliability. Quality attributes play a role in the problem domain; design aspects are elements in the solution domain. We will use an industrial case to illustrate our ideas. The discussion ranges from how design aspects are defined in the architecture based on quality attributes, to how design aspects can be used to verify the realized system against the prescribed architecture. The industrial case is a product family of medical imaging systems. For this product family, the family members are constructed from a component-based platform. Here, it is especially useful to achieve aspect-completeness of components, allowing system composition without worrying about individual design aspects.