Analysis and Transformation of Pipe-like Web Mashups for End User Programmers

Mashups are becoming increasingly popular as end users are able to easily access, manipulate, and compose data from several web sources. To support end users, communities are forming around mashup development environments that facilitate sharing code and knowledge. We have observed, however, that end user mashups tend to suffer from several deficiencies, such as inoperable components or references to invalid data sources, and that those deficiencies are often propagated through the rampant reuse in these end user communities. In this work, we identify and specify ten code smells indicative of deficiencies we observed in a sample of 8,051 pipe-like web mashups developed by thousands of end users in the popular Yahoo! Pipes environment. We show through an empirical study that end users generally prefer pipes that lack those smells, and then present eleven specialized refactorings that we designed to target and remove the smells. Our refactorings reduce the complexity of pipes, increase their abstraction, update broken sources of data and dated components, and standardize pipes to fit the community development patterns. Our assessment on the sample of mashups shows that smells are present in 81% of the pipes, and that the proposed refactorings can reduce that number to 16%, illustrating the potential of refactoring to support thousands of end users developing pipe-like mashups.

Editor web de conexiones para la creación visual de aplicaciones composicionales mediante mashup

A lo largo de este documento se describe el trabajo llevado a cabo para el logro de todos objetivos de este Trabajo Fin de Grado, el cual tiene como objetivo principal la mejora de la herramienta de edición de las conexiones internas de un mashup proporcionada actualmente por la plataforma web WireCloud. WireCloud es una plataforma web centrada en la construcción visual de mashups de aplicaciones a partir de la interconexión de pequeñas aplicaciones web denominadas widgets. Los principales inconvenientes presentes en el actual editor de conexiones que incluye esta plataforma afectan principalmente a sus usuarios con poca experiencia en diseño web. Estos usuarios tienen dificultades a la hora de interpretar el esquema de conexiones de un mashup ajeno y también, de crear el esquema de conexiones de un mashup propio. La mejora realizada supone un cambio en la metáfora utilizada para la creación de las conexiones, que ahora se organiza en torno a unidades conceptuales denominadas comportamientos que representan subconjuntos cohesionados de conexiones con significado (representando por si mismos comportamientos relevantes del mashup). Con este cambio se logra solventar los inconvenientes que presenta el actual sistema, principalmente la necesidad de crear (y visualizar) simultáneamente todas las conexiones requeridas por el mashup, lo cual supone que: a) es difícil identificar con qué propósito se ha creado cada conexión y qué relación guardan unas conexiones con otras. b) existe un riesgo de olvidar alguna conexión, fundamentalmente por ser difícil la interpretación del propósito de cada conexión y por la imposibilidad de identificar y nombrar conjuntos de conexiones que tienen un propósito determinado. Antes de implementar el código fuente se realizó un estudio pormenorizado de las tecnologías que actualmente utiliza WireCloud, además de un estudio en profundidad de la situación del anterior editor y de las nuevas características y ventajas buscadas en este nuevo editor. Con este último propósito se definieron varios casos de estudio que ayudaron a concretar qué se ha de entender por un comportamiento en el diseño de las conexiones de un mashup y también, ayudaron a definir la mejor organización visual del nuevo editor en torno al concepto de comportamiento. El resto del trabajo consistió en la implementación del nuevo editor y en la elaboración de toda la documentación relacionada: principalmente el manual de uso del nuevo editor que estará disponible como parte de la documentación online de WireCloud.---ABSTRACT---This document describes the work carried out for the achievement of all targets of this Final Project, which has as its main objective the improvement of the edition tool of the mashup’s internal connections that is currently provided by WireCloud. WireCloud is a web platform focused on building visual of web mashups from the interconnection of web applications called web widgets. The main drawbacks present in the current web editor of connections, includes on this platform, mainly affect to users with little experience in web design. These users have difficulties for interpreting the wiring diagram of any web mashup and also, creating the wiring diagram of an own web mashup. The improvement made a change in the metaphor used for creating connections, now managing a conceptual units called behaviors that represent subsets of meaningful connections. This change overcomes the drawbacks of the current system, mainly the need to create and display simultaneously all connections required by the web mashup, which means that: a) Difficultly identify what purpose is created each connection and how they relate to each other connections. b) There is the risk of forgetting some connection, mainly for being difficult to interpret the purpose of each connection and the inability to identify and name sets of connections that have a specific purpose. Before deploying the source code, the study of the technologies currently used WireCloud was performed, plus the study of the situation of the previous editor and new features and advantages searched for this new editor was performed too. For the latter purpose was defined several case studies that helped to specify what understood by behavior in the design of the connections of a web mashup and also that helped to define the best visual organization of the new behavior-oriented wiring editor. The rest of the work involved in implementing the new wiring web editor and in the preparation of all documentation related: mainly user manual for using the new wiring web editor that will be available as part of the WireCloud online documentation.

Niños 2.0 : una experiencia formativa en actitudes y valores para el profesorado ante la Web 2.0 y TIC.

Monográfico con el título: 'Metodologías de Aprendizaje Colaborativo'. Resumen basado en el de la publicación

A web 2.0 user interface for wide-area resource monitoring

Resource monitoring in distributed systems is required to understand the 'health' of the overall system and to help identify particular problems, such as dysfunctional hardware or faulty system or application software. Monitoring systems such as GridRM provide the ability to connect to any number of different types of monitoring agents and provide different views of the system, based on a client's particular preferences. Web 2.0 technologies, and in particular 'mashups', are emerging as a promising technique for rapidly constructing rich user interfaces, that combine and present data in intuitive ways. This paper describes a Web 2.0 user interface that was created to expose resource data harvested by the GridRM resource monitoring system.

Utilizing cross-domain SOAP Web services using client-side languages in an enterprise mashup platform

Service oriented architectures (SOA) based on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Web services have attracted the attention of enterprises mainly for business-to-business integration and to create composite applications that execute business processes. An existing problem is the lack of preoccupation with non technical users due to the fact that to create a composite application to fulfill users needs, it is necessary to be in contact with IT staff. To overcome this issue, enterprises can take advantage of web 2.0, 'introducing in the development stage some technologies like mashups and some concepts like user empowerment, collaborative work and collective intelligence. Some results [3] [13] have shown how web 2.0 concepts can help non technical users to produce relative complex business processes. However, traditional enterprise requirements goes beyond typical web 2.0 solutions in several aspects: (1) traditional enterprise systems are based on heterogeneous stack of technologies that are not directly exploitable from a web-based client (where SOAP web services play an important role); (2) web browsers set some cross-domain security constraints making difficult to integrate services from diverse domains. In this paper, a contribution to two web 2.0 research projects [14] [15] partially solves the problems described: provide a way to invoke cross-domain backend services (based on SOAP technologies) directly only using clientside languages, without a need for any adaptation layer. © 2010 ACM.

Customized mashups for improved reputation visualization

This document describes a possible use for the YouReputation API. A mashup combining the YouReputation and the Flickr APIs attempts to improve the visualization of reputation. First, this paper gives an introduction to Web services and APIs and further explains the developed prototype. This paper introduces an API that can be easily combined with other APIs to improve the representation of reputation terms and therefore enhance usability and design.

A Metadirectory of Web Components for Mashup Composition

Because of the growing availability of third-party APIs, services, widgets and any other reusable web component, mashup developers now face a vast amount of candidate components for their developments. Moreover, these components quite often are scattered in many different repositories and web sites, which makes difficult their selection or discovery. In this paper, we discuss the problem of component selection in Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Mashup-Driven Development, and introduce the Linked Mashups Ontology (LiMOn), a model that allows describing mashups and their components for integrating and sharing mashup information such as categorization or dependencies. The model has allowed the building of an integrated, centralized metadirectory of web components for query and selection, which has served to evaluate the model. The metadirectory allows accessing various heterogeneous repositories of mashups and web components while using external information from the Linked Data cloud, helping mashup development.

End-User-Oriented Telco Mashups: The OMELETTE Approach

With the success of Web 2.0 we are witnessing a growing number of services and APIs exposed by Telecom, IT and content providers. Targeting the Web community and, in particular, Web application developers, service providers expose capabilities of their infrastructures and applications in order to open new markets and to reach new customer groups. However, due to the complexity of the underlying technologies, the last step, i.e., the consumption and integration of the offered services, is a non-trivial and time-consuming task that is still a prerogative of expert developers. Although many approaches to lower the entry barriers for end users exist, little success has been achieved so far. In this paper, we introduce the OMELETTE project and show how it addresses end-user-oriented telco mashup development. We present the goals of the project, describe its contributions, summarize current results, and describe current and future work.

Ranking web services using centralities and social indicators

Nowadays, developers of web application mashups face a sheer overwhelming variety and pluralism of web services. Therefore, choosing appropriate web services to achieve specific goals requires a certain amount of knowledge as well as expertise. In order to support users in choosing appropriate web services it is not only important to match their search criteria to a dataset of possible choices but also to rank the results according to their relevance, thus minimizing the time it takes for taking such a choice. Therefore, we investigated six ranking approaches in an empirical manner and compared them to each other. Moreover, we have had a look on how one can combine those ranking algorithms linearly in order to maximize the quality of their outputs.

Estudio de las posibilidades de los datos abiertos enlazados (Linked Open Data) para la realización de mashups de ámbito geográfico.

La web ha sufrido una drástica transformación en los últimos años, debido principalmente a su popularización y a la enorme cantidad de información que alberga. Debido a estos factores se ha dado el salto de la denominada Web de Documentos, a la Web Semántica, donde toda la información está relacionada con otra. Las principales ventajas de la información enlazada estriban en la facilidad de reutilización, accesibilidad y disponibilidad para ser encontrada por el usuario. En este trabajo se pretende poner de manifiesto la utilidad de los datos enlazados aplicados al ámbito geográfico y mostrar como pueden ser empleados hoy en día. Para ello se han explotado datos enlazados de carácter espacial provenientes de diferentes fuentes, a través de servidores externos o endpoints SPARQL. Además de eso se ha trabajado con un servidor privado capaz de proporcionar información enlazada almacenada en un equipo personal. La explotación de información enlazada se ha implementado en una aplicación web en lenguaje JavaScript, tratando de abstraer totalmente al usuario del tratamiento de los datos a nivel interno de la aplicación. Esta aplicación cuenta además con algunos módulos y opciones capaces de interactuar con las consultas realizadas a los servidores, consiguiendo un entorno más intuitivo y agradable para el usuario. ABSTRACT: In recent years the web has suffered a drastic transformation because of the popularization and the huge amount of stored information. Due to these factors it has gone from Documents web to Semantic web, where the data are linked. The main advantages of Linked Data lie in the ease of his reuse, accessibility and availability to be located by users. The aim of this research is to highlight the usefulness of the geographic linked data and show how can be used at present time. To get this, the spatial linked data coming from several sources have been managed through external servers or also called endpoints. Besides, it has been worked with a private server able to provide linked data stored in a personal computer. The use of linked data has been implemented in a JavaScript web application, trying completely to abstract the internally data treatment of the application to make the user ignore it. This application has some modules and options that are able to interact with the queries made to the servers, getting a more intuitive and kind environment for users.

Marco de caracterización y cálculo de las métricas de calidad de los componentes web para el desarrollo de aplicaciones de usuario final

En la Web 2.0, donde usuarios finales sin grandes conocimientos de programación pueden interactuar y crear aplicaciones web utilizando componentes publicados en Internet, ofrecidos por una gran variedad de proveedores de servicio. La selección de estos componentes requiere de un análisis exhaustivo por parte de los usuarios sobre las propiedades de estos componentes en referencia a su calidad. En este proyecto, se presentan dos modelos de calidad según una estructura jerárquica, uno para componentes web como elementos autónomos y otro para componentes utilizados en aplicaciones de mashup, basado en un análisis de la emergente Web 2.0. Además, se define una herramienta de medición y anotación de calidad para los distintos niveles de los modelos. Estas herramientas pretenden ser un útil instrumento para los desarrolladores y usuarios de componentes y mashups.---ABSTRACT---In the Web 2.0, where end users without a technical programming background can interact and develop web applications leveraging web components published on the Internet, offered by a great diversity of service providers. This component selection requires an exhaustive analysis by these end users based on the requirements of these components related to their quality. In this work, two quality models are presented according to a hierarchical structure, one for web components as independent elements and another one for web components as parts of web mashup applications, based on an analysis of the emerging Web 2.0. In addition, a measuring and write down quality framework is defined to weigh the quality of all the levels of the models. These tools intend to provide a useful instrument to components and mashup developers and end users.

Wirecloud Mobile: soporte para el enriquecimiento y la visualización de mashups de aplicación en dispositivos móviles

El mundo actual es una fuente ilimitada de información. El manejo y análisis de estas enormes cantidades de información es casi imposible, pero también es difícil poder capturar y relacionar diferentes tipos de datos entre sí y, a partir de este análisis, sacar conclusiones que puedan conllevar a la realización, o no, de un conjunto de acciones. Esto hace necesario la implementación de sistemas que faciliten el acceso, visualización y manejo de estos datos; con el objetivo de poder relacionarlos, analizarlos, y permitir al usuario que, de la manera más sencilla posible, pueda sacar conclusiones de estos. De esta necesidad de manejar, visualizar y relacionar datos nació la plataforma Wirecloud. Wirecloud ha sido desarrollado en el laboratorio Computer Networks & Web Technologies Lab (CoNWeT Lab) del grupo CETTICO, ubicado en la Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Informáticos de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Wirecloud es una plataforma de código abierto que permite, utilizando las últimas tecnologías web, recoger la información que se quiere analizar de diferentes fuentes en tiempo real e, interconectando entre sí una serie de componentes y operadores, realizar una mezcla y procesado de esta información para después usarla y mostrarla de la manera más usable posible al usuario. Un ejemplo de uso real de la plataforma podría ser: utilizar la lista de repartidores de una empresa de envío urgente para conocer cuáles son sus posiciones en tiempo real sobre un mapa utilizando el posicionamiento GPS de sus dispositivos móviles, y poder asignarles el destino y la ruta más óptima; todo esto desde la misma pantalla. El proyecto Wirecloud Mobile corresponde a la versión móvil de la plataforma Wirecloud, cuyo objetivos principales pretenden compatibilizar Wirecloud con el mayor número de sistemas operativos móviles que actualmente hay en el mercado, permitiendo su uso en cualquier parte del mundo; y poder enriquecer los componentes mencionados en el párrafo anterior con las características y propiedades nativas de los dispositivos móviles actuales, como por ejemplo el posicionamiento GPS, el acelerómetro, la cámara, el micrófono, los altavoces o tecnologías de comunicación como el Bluetooth o el NFC.---ABSTRACT---The current world is a limitless source of information. Use and analysis of this huge amount of information is nearly impossible; but it is also difficult being able to capture and relate different kinds of data to each other and, from this analysis, draw conclusions that can lead to the fulfilment or not of a set of relevant actions. This requires the implementation of systems to facilitate the access, visualization and management of this data easier; with the purpose of being capable of relate, analyse, and allow the user to draw conclusions from them. And out of this need to manage, visualize and relate data, the Wirecloud platform was born. Wirecloud has been developed at the Computer Networks & Web Technologies Lab (CoNWeT Lab) of CETTICO group, located at Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Informáticos of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Wirecloud is an open-source platform that allows, using the latest web technologies, to collect the information from different sources in real time and interlinking a set of widgets and operators, make a mixture and processing of this information, so then use it and show it in the most usable way. An example of the actual use of the platform could be: using the list of deliverymen from an express delivery company in order to know, using GPS positioning from their mobile devices, which are their current locations in a map; and be able to assign them the destination and optimum route; all of this from the same display/screen. Wirecloud Mobile Project is the mobile version of the Wirecloud platform, whose main objectives aim to make Wirecloud compatible with the largest amount of mobile operative systems that are currently available, allowing its use everywhere; and enriching and improving the previously mentioned components with the native specifications and properties of the present mobile devices, such as GPS positioning, accelerometer, camera, microphone, built-in speakers, or communication technologies such as Bluetooth or NFC (Near Field Communications).

Feature LDA:a supervised topic model for automatic detection of web API documentations from the web

Web APIs have gained increasing popularity in recent Web service technology development owing to its simplicity of technology stack and the proliferation of mashups. However, efficiently discovering Web APIs and the relevant documentations on the Web is still a challenging task even with the best resources available on the Web. In this paper we cast the problem of detecting the Web API documentations as a text classification problem of classifying a given Web page as Web API associated or not. We propose a supervised generative topic model called feature latent Dirichlet allocation (feaLDA) which offers a generic probabilistic framework for automatic detection of Web APIs. feaLDA not only captures the correspondence between data and the associated class labels, but also provides a mechanism for incorporating side information such as labelled features automatically learned from data that can effectively help improving classification performance. Extensive experiments on our Web APIs documentation dataset shows that the feaLDA model outperforms three strong supervised baselines including naive Bayes, support vector machines, and the maximum entropy model, by over 3% in classification accuracy. In addition, feaLDA also gives superior performance when compared against other existing supervised topic models.

Iis--integrated Interactome System: A Web-based Platform For The Annotation, Analysis And Visualization Of Protein-metabolite-gene-drug Interactions By Integrating A Variety Of Data Sources And Tools.

High-throughput screening of physical, genetic and chemical-genetic interactions brings important perspectives in the Systems Biology field, as the analysis of these interactions provides new insights into protein/gene function, cellular metabolic variations and the validation of therapeutic targets and drug design. However, such analysis depends on a pipeline connecting different tools that can automatically integrate data from diverse sources and result in a more comprehensive dataset that can be properly interpreted. We describe here the Integrated Interactome System (IIS), an integrative platform with a web-based interface for the annotation, analysis and visualization of the interaction profiles of proteins/genes, metabolites and drugs of interest. IIS works in four connected modules: (i) Submission module, which receives raw data derived from Sanger sequencing (e.g. two-hybrid system); (ii) Search module, which enables the user to search for the processed reads to be assembled into contigs/singlets, or for lists of proteins/genes, metabolites and drugs of interest, and add them to the project; (iii) Annotation module, which assigns annotations from several databases for the contigs/singlets or lists of proteins/genes, generating tables with automatic annotation that can be manually curated; and (iv) Interactome module, which maps the contigs/singlets or the uploaded lists to entries in our integrated database, building networks that gather novel identified interactions, protein and metabolite expression/concentration levels, subcellular localization and computed topological metrics, GO biological processes and KEGG pathways enrichment. This module generates a XGMML file that can be imported into Cytoscape or be visualized directly on the web. We have developed IIS by the integration of diverse databases following the need of appropriate tools for a systematic analysis of physical, genetic and chemical-genetic interactions. IIS was validated with yeast two-hybrid, proteomics and metabolomics datasets, but it is also extendable to other datasets. IIS is freely available online at: http://www.lge.ibi.unicamp.br/lnbio/IIS/.

Acessibilidade dos sítios web dos governos estaduais brasileiros: uma análise quantitativa entre 1996 e 2007

A utilização da web para a disponibilização de informações e serviços de órgãos governamentais para os cidadãos tem se tornado cada vez mais expressiva. Assim, a garantia de que esses conteúdos e serviços possam ser acessíveis a qualquer cidadão é imprescindível, independentemente de necessidades especiais ou de quaisquer outras barreiras. No Brasil, o Decreto-Lei nº5.296/2004 determinou que todos os órgãos governamentais deveriam adaptar seus sítios na web de acordo com critérios de acessibilidade até dezembro de 2005. Com o objetivo de verificar a evolução da acessibilidade ao longo dos anos e como foi o impacto dessa legislação, este artigo analisa a acessibilidade dos sítios dos governos estaduais brasileiros por meio de amostras coletadas entre 1996 e 2007. Foram efetuadas análises por meio de métricas, obtidas por avaliações com ferramentas automáticas. Os resultados indicam que a legislação teve pouco impacto para a melhoria real da acessibilidade dos sítios no período indicado, com uma melhora somente em 2007. Verifica-se que se faz necessário adotar políticas públicas mais efetivas para que as pessoas com necessidades especiais tenham os seus direitos para acesso a informações e aos serviços públicos na web assegurados mais amplamente.