Vol.10 No.3 September 15, 2011

Research Articles: 

Exception Handling in Pervasive Service Composition Using Normative Agents (pp175-196)
        J. Octavio Gutierrez-Garcia and Felix F. Ramos-Corchado
The full integration of pervasive computing services into daily life leads to smart spaces with a wide range of intelligent devices that must be dynamically composed to provide a transparent service to users. To achieve this, pervasive services have to coordinate among themselves in both an automated and autonomous manner, with the aim of satisfying complex user requirements that no single service can fulfill. However, existing pervasive environments are normally ad-hoc and isolated systems incapable of: 1) reacting to dynamic and unforeseen situations that may raise exceptions, and 2) collaborating with pervasive services beyond their physical limits. The contributions of this work are: 1) Proposing a normative agent-based service composition method capable of handling exceptions in open pervasive systems. 2) Using the Web as the underlying infrastructure where pervasive services provided by either smart devices or web services can coexist and interact with each other. 3) Providing a modular and hierarchical agent coordination method based on virtual organizations to sustain coordination among agents belonging to multiple organizations (smart spaces). 4) Integrating exception handling mechanisms based on social norms and formalized by event calculus predicates into virtual organizations to support and guide exception handling in both a dynamic and autonomous manner.

A New End-User Composition Model to Empower Knowledge Workers to Develop Rich Internet Applications (pp197-233)
        David Lizcano, Fernando Alonso, Javier Soriano, and Genoveva López
Enabling real end-user programming development is the next logical stage in the evolution of Internet-wide service-based applications. Even so, the vision of end users programming their own web-based solutions has not yet materialized. This will continue to be so unless both industry and the research community rise to the ambitious challenge of devising an end-to-end compositional model for developing a new age of end-user web application development tools. This paper describes a new composition model designed to empower programming-illiterate end users to create and share their own off-the-shelf rich internet applications in a fully visual fashion. This paper presents the main insights and outcomes of our research and development efforts as part of a number of successful European Union research projects. A framework implementing this model was developed as part of the European Seventh Framework Programme FAST Project and the Spanish EzWeb Project and allowed us to validate the rationale behind our approach.

Migration Desktop Applications to the Internet: A Novel Virtualization Paradigm Based on Web Operating Systems (pp234-272)
        Fabrizio Lamberti and Andrea Sanna
In the past years, many solutions for virtualizing desktops and applications have been proposed. Unfortunately, given their significant resource requirements, their limited portability, and the achieved performances in terms of interactivity and usability, they did not prove to be capable of effectively replacing traditional local desktops. Recently, Web Operating Systems (Web OSs) started to be developed as an alternative approach for the creation of personal desktop environments, where newly designed applications created by leveraging on Web technologies can be accessed by end-users in a unified and seamless way. In this paper, a software architecture designed to further enhance the attractiveness of such environments by allowing existing desktop applications to be migrated into Web OS frameworks without any modification is presented. An automatic tool exploits image processing techniques to analyze the Graphics User Interface (GUI) of a remotely running application and to produce a detailed description for it, by recording its visual appearance and dynamic behavior. Then, this description is reloaded by a Web OS module that exploits remote computing techniques to provide the user with a local-like interaction with the virtualized application running on a remote machine. Thanks to the achieved separation between application logic and interface, the designed approach makes it possible to recreate virtual copies of original applications tailored to user device's characteristics, and it is additionally capable of providing significant improvements in terms of bandwidth usage and interactivity degree. Thus, without any re-coding, the original Web OS environment can be effectively enriched by letting the users run possibly customized copies of the same applications
their are used to work with on a traditional desktop.

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