JWE Abstracts 

Vol.10 No.4 December 23, 2011

Research Articles: 

A Crowdsourced Approach for Concern-Sensitive Integration of Information across the Web (pp289-315)
       
Sergio Firmenich, Marco Winckler, Gustavo Rossi, and Silvia Gordillo
Currently, users navigate across the Web in order to accomplish complex tasks. Frequently, these tasks involve working with many different Web applications. For this kind of tasks users have to move information manually among Web pages. While in the field of Adaptive Web there is important and meaningful research about adapting Web sites according with the userīs activity most adaptation approaches are applied only in the boundaries of single Web applications. In this work we show to use Client-Side adaptation to provide new techniques for concern-sensitive, task-based adaptations across the Web. We show an architectural overview of our tool and illustrate the power of the approach with examples.

Using Web Quality Models and a Strategy for Purpose-Oriented Evaluations (pp316-352)
       
Luis Olsina, Philip Lew, Alexander Dieser, and Belen Rivera
Web applications and their quality evaluation has been the subject of abundant research. However, instantiated models have been used mostly for the purpose of understanding, rather than improving. In this paper, we propose utilizing a quality modeling framework together with a non-intrusive evaluation strategy to instantiate quality models with the specific purpose of not only to model and understand a Web application in-use, but also to improve it. Starting with a quality modeling framework, our approach instantiates models for both quality in use and external quality, resulting in a requirements tree for both followed by evaluation and then combined with a mechanism to develop relationships between them. Interpreting these relationships viz. ‘depends on’, and ‘influences’, in alignment with the ISO 25010 quality life cycle model, is the basis for continuous improvement. This is illustrated with a case study showing the underlying strategy from model instantiation to application improvement.

A Finite-State Machine Approach for Modeling and Analyzing RESTful Systems (pp353-390)
       
Ivan Zuzak, Ivan Budiselic, and Goran Delac
Representational State Transfer (REST), as an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems, enables scalable operation of the World Wide Web and is the foundation for its future evolution. However, although described over 10 years ago, no formal model for representing RESTful systems exists that is comprehensive in following REST principles, intuitive to Web engineers and researchers alike, and offers practical development guidelines. The lack of such formal models has hindered understanding of both the REST architectural style and the Web architecture, consequently limiting Web engineering advancement. In this paper we present a generic model of RESTful systems based on a finite-state machine formalism. We show that the model enables intuitive formalization of REST design principles, including uniform interface, stateless client-server operation, and code-on-demand execution. Furthermore, we describe the model's mapping to a system-level view of operation and apply the model to an example Web application and several real-word Web applications. Finally, we explore the practical challenges and benefits of using the model in the field of Web engineering, ranging from better understanding of REST to designing frameworks for RESTful system development.

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