<p>Ma’at Solution är ett Österrikiskt företag beläget i Linz, som utvecklar affärssystem specialiserade på aktieportföljsoptimering och värdepappers hantering. Företaget önskar komplettera sin nuvarande produkt Ma’at Invest med en Internetversion som delvis ska fungera som substitut men också som komplement till huvudprogrammet.Projektet kallades Ma’at Online. Man vill använda sig av de fördelar som finns i och med det nuvarande Java-utvecklingsverktyget- Eclipse. Exempel på fördelar är möjligheten att förstora och förminska önskade fönster vid behov. Genom det nyutvecklade Adobe (förut Macromedia) Flex är detta nu möjligt även på Internet. Ur denna idé utvecklades ett övergripande mål:</p><p>- Skapa ett användarvänligt gränssnitt för Ma’at Online med hjälp av Adobe Flex.</p><p>Initialt analyserades arbetsflödet i det existerande programmet med hjälp av UMLnotation. På så sätt var det enklare att förstå hur programmet var uppbyggt och vilka funktioner som ansågs nödvändiga. Vidare definierades målgruppen för att förstå hur programmet ska användas och vilka krav som bör ställas. Dessa krav utarbetades ytterligare och användes sedan för att omforma arbetsflödet från den nuvarande applikationen. Därefter utvecklades en alternativ design som mötte de utsatta kraven. Slutligen testades programmet på användarna för att säkerställa användbarheten.</p><p>Ytterligare lades kraft på att skapa ett gränssnitt som tog vara på fördelarna med animation och användarmanipulation för att skapa ett bättre och enklare arbetsflöde som förhindrar frustration och misstag och som istället hjälper användaren vid behov.</p><p>Ur datateknisk synpunkt undersöktes vilka komponenter som borde användas och hur de kunde skapas i Adobe Flex med hjälp av programmeringsspråket ActionScript.</p><p>Projektet resulterade i ett användarvänligt och estetiskt gränssnitt baserad på ny revolutionerande teknik som talar till rätt målgrupp och uppfyller de för programmet uppsatta målen.</p><p>Av utvecklingsarbetet med Adobe Flex har slutsatsen dragits att tekniken fortfarande har komplikationer, men att inom ett par år kommer de funktioner som är vanligt förekommande i standardprogram användas på Internet.</p> / <p>Ma’at Solutions is an Austrian software company located in Linz. The company is specialized in financial business applications such as portfolio management systems.The company wishes to extend its existing product Ma’at Invest with an Internet version that will work as a substitute or complement to the main program. The project is named Ma’at Online. Ma’at Solutions would like to use the advantages in the present program developed in the Java development environment -Eclipse. An example of features that the company would like to transfer to the online version is that the user can enlarge or minimize windows on request. Through the newly released Adobe (former Macromedia) Flex this is possible even on the Internet. From this a general goal was established:</p><p>- Create the Ma’at Online interface with an optimal usability approach in Adobe Flex.</p><p>The workflow in the existing application was analyzed with UML-modeling notation. In this way it was easier to understand the purpose of the program and which functions were required. Furthermore the target user was defined to acquire the needs of the users. These requirements were then developed even more and were used in the remodeling of the workflow to better suit an Internet version. In addition to that, an alternative design was developed, that met the requirements stated in the prior stage. At last an evaluation was performed and a test study of the finished prototype was conducted to make sure that the program meets the requirements.</p><p>During the development process, time was spent on trying to use the advantages of animations and interaction manipulations to create a better and easier workflow that prevents the user from frustration and errors. Instead it is supposed to provide help to the user when needed. The components in the Adobe Flex were investigated and tested to see how they could be created in the scripting language Action Script and if they could fit into the application.</p><p>The result of the project was that the application is user-friendly and has an aesthetic interface based on an edge-cutting technology.</p><p>The conclusion of the development process in Adobe Flex is that the technology still has complications, however in a few years, the eatures used in standalone programs will be used on the Internet.</p>

Cloud computing is a model for enabling on-demand access to a shared pool of computing resources. With virtually limitless on-demand resources, a cloud environment enables the hosted Internet application to quickly cope when there is an increase in the workload. However, the overhead of provisioning resources exposes the Internet application to periods of under-provisioning and performance degradation. Moreover, the performance interference, due to the consolidation in the cloud environment, complicates the performance management of the Internet applications. In this dissertation, we propose two approaches to mitigate the impact of the resources provisioning overhead. The first approach employs control theory to scale resources vertically and cope fast with workload. This approach assumes that the provider has knowledge and control over the platform running in the virtual machines (VMs), which limits it to Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers. The second approach is a customer-side one that deals with the horizontal scalability in an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model. It addresses the trade-off problem between cost and performance with a multi-goal optimization solution. This approach finds the scale thresholds that achieve the highest performance with the lowest increase in the cost. Moreover, the second approach employs a proposed time series forecasting algorithm to scale the application proactively and avoid under-utilization periods. Furthermore, to mitigate the interference impact on the Internet application performance, we developed a system which finds and eliminates the VMs suffering from performance interference. The developed system is a light-weight solution which does not imply provider involvement. To evaluate our approaches and the designed algorithms at large-scale level, we developed a simulator called (ScaleSim). In the simulator, we implemented scalability components acting as the scalability components of Amazon EC2. The current scalability implementation in Amazon EC2 is used as a reference point for evaluating the improvement in the scalable application performance. ScaleSim is fed with realistic models of the RUBiS benchmark extracted from the real environment. The workload is generated from the access logs of the 1998 world cup website. The results show that optimizing the scalability thresholds and adopting proactive scalability can mitigate 88% of the resources provisioning overhead impact with only a 9% increase in the cost. / Cloud computing ist ein Model fuer einen Pool von Rechenressourcen, den sie auf Anfrage zur Verfuegung stellt. Internetapplikationen in einer Cloud-Infrastruktur koennen bei einer erhoehten Auslastung schnell die Lage meistern, indem sie die durch die Cloud-Infrastruktur auf Anfrage zur Verfuegung stehenden und virtuell unbegrenzten Ressourcen in Anspruch nehmen. Allerdings sind solche Applikationen durch den Verwaltungsaufwand zur Bereitstellung der Ressourcen mit Perioden von Verschlechterung der Performanz und Ressourcenunterversorgung konfrontiert. Ausserdem ist das Management der Performanz aufgrund der Konsolidierung in einer Cloud Umgebung kompliziert. Um die Auswirkung des Mehraufwands zur Bereitstellung von Ressourcen abzuschwächen, schlagen wir in dieser Dissertation zwei Methoden vor. Die erste Methode verwendet die Kontrolltheorie, um Ressourcen vertikal zu skalieren und somit schneller mit einer erhoehten Auslastung umzugehen. Diese Methode setzt voraus, dass der Provider das Wissen und die Kontrolle über die in virtuellen Maschinen laufende Plattform hat. Der Provider ist dadurch als „Plattform als Service (PaaS)“ und als „Software als Service (SaaS)“ Provider definiert. Die zweite Methode bezieht sich auf die Clientseite und behandelt die horizontale Skalierbarkeit in einem Infrastruktur als Service (IaaS)-Model. Sie behandelt den Zielkonflikt zwischen den Kosten und der Performanz mit einer mehrzieloptimierten Loesung. Sie findet massstaebliche Schwellenwerte, die die hoechste Performanz mit der niedrigsten Steigerung der Kosten gewaehrleisten. Ausserdem ist in der zweiten Methode ein Algorithmus der Zeitreifenvorhersage verwendet, um die Applikation proaktiv zu skalieren und Perioden der nicht optimalen Ausnutzung zu vermeiden. Um die Performanz der Internetapplikation zu verbessern, haben wir zusaetzlich ein System entwickelt, das die unter Beeintraechtigung der Performanz leidenden virtuellen Maschinen findet und entfernt. Das entwickelte System ist eine leichtgewichtige Lösung, die keine Provider-Beteiligung verlangt. Um die Skalierbarkeit unserer Methoden und der entwickelten Algorithmen auszuwerten, haben wir einen Simulator namens „ScaleSim“ entwickelt. In diesem Simulator haben wir Komponenten implementiert, die als Skalierbarkeitskomponenten der Amazon EC2 agieren. Die aktuelle Skalierbarkeitsimplementierung in Amazon EC2 ist als Referenzimplementierung fuer die Messesung der Verbesserungen in der Performanz von skalierbaren Applikationen. Der Simulator wurde auf realistische Modelle der RUBiS-Benchmark angewendet, die aus einer echten Umgebung extrahiert wurden. Die Auslastung ist aus den Zugriffslogs der World Cup Website von 1998 erzeugt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Optimierung der Schwellenwerte und der angewendeten proaktiven Skalierbarkeit den Verwaltungsaufwand zur Bereitstellung der Ressourcen bis um 88% reduziert kann, während sich die Kosten nur um 9% erhöhen.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are a new generation of web applications that break away from the concepts on which traditional web applications are based. RIAs are more interactive and responsive than traditional web applications since RIAs allow client-side scripting (such as JavaScript) and asynchronous communication with the server (using AJAX). Although these are improvements in terms of user-friendliness, there is a big impact on our ability to automatically explore (crawl) these applications. Traditional crawling algorithms are not sufficient for crawling RIAs. We should be able to crawl RIAs in order to be able to search their content and build their models for various purposes such as reverse-engineering, detecting security vulnerabilities, assessing usability, and applying model-based testing techniques. One important problem is designing efficient crawling strategies for RIAs. It seems possible to design crawling strategies more efficient than the standard crawling strategies, the Breadth-First and the Depth-First. In this thesis, we explore the possibilities of designing efficient crawling strategies. We use a general approach that we called Model-based Crawling and present two crawling strategies that are designed using this approach. We show by experimental results that model-based crawling strategies are more efficient than the standard strategies.

Ma’at Solution är ett Österrikiskt företag beläget i Linz, som utvecklar affärssystem specialiserade på aktieportföljsoptimering och värdepappers hantering. Företaget önskar komplettera sin nuvarande produkt Ma’at Invest med en Internetversion som delvis ska fungera som substitut men också som komplement till huvudprogrammet.Projektet kallades Ma’at Online. Man vill använda sig av de fördelar som finns i och med det nuvarande Java-utvecklingsverktyget- Eclipse. Exempel på fördelar är möjligheten att förstora och förminska önskade fönster vid behov. Genom det nyutvecklade Adobe (förut Macromedia) Flex är detta nu möjligt även på Internet. Ur denna idé utvecklades ett övergripande mål: - Skapa ett användarvänligt gränssnitt för Ma’at Online med hjälp av Adobe Flex. Initialt analyserades arbetsflödet i det existerande programmet med hjälp av UMLnotation. På så sätt var det enklare att förstå hur programmet var uppbyggt och vilka funktioner som ansågs nödvändiga. Vidare definierades målgruppen för att förstå hur programmet ska användas och vilka krav som bör ställas. Dessa krav utarbetades ytterligare och användes sedan för att omforma arbetsflödet från den nuvarande applikationen. Därefter utvecklades en alternativ design som mötte de utsatta kraven. Slutligen testades programmet på användarna för att säkerställa användbarheten. Ytterligare lades kraft på att skapa ett gränssnitt som tog vara på fördelarna med animation och användarmanipulation för att skapa ett bättre och enklare arbetsflöde som förhindrar frustration och misstag och som istället hjälper användaren vid behov. Ur datateknisk synpunkt undersöktes vilka komponenter som borde användas och hur de kunde skapas i Adobe Flex med hjälp av programmeringsspråket ActionScript. Projektet resulterade i ett användarvänligt och estetiskt gränssnitt baserad på ny revolutionerande teknik som talar till rätt målgrupp och uppfyller de för programmet uppsatta målen. Av utvecklingsarbetet med Adobe Flex har slutsatsen dragits att tekniken fortfarande har komplikationer, men att inom ett par år kommer de funktioner som är vanligt förekommande i standardprogram användas på Internet. / Ma’at Solutions is an Austrian software company located in Linz. The company is specialized in financial business applications such as portfolio management systems.The company wishes to extend its existing product Ma’at Invest with an Internet version that will work as a substitute or complement to the main program. The project is named Ma’at Online. Ma’at Solutions would like to use the advantages in the present program developed in the Java development environment -Eclipse. An example of features that the company would like to transfer to the online version is that the user can enlarge or minimize windows on request. Through the newly released Adobe (former Macromedia) Flex this is possible even on the Internet. From this a general goal was established: - Create the Ma’at Online interface with an optimal usability approach in Adobe Flex. The workflow in the existing application was analyzed with UML-modeling notation. In this way it was easier to understand the purpose of the program and which functions were required. Furthermore the target user was defined to acquire the needs of the users. These requirements were then developed even more and were used in the remodeling of the workflow to better suit an Internet version. In addition to that, an alternative design was developed, that met the requirements stated in the prior stage. At last an evaluation was performed and a test study of the finished prototype was conducted to make sure that the program meets the requirements. During the development process, time was spent on trying to use the advantages of animations and interaction manipulations to create a better and easier workflow that prevents the user from frustration and errors. Instead it is supposed to provide help to the user when needed. The components in the Adobe Flex were investigated and tested to see how they could be created in the scripting language Action Script and if they could fit into the application. The result of the project was that the application is user-friendly and has an aesthetic interface based on an edge-cutting technology. The conclusion of the development process in Adobe Flex is that the technology still has complications, however in a few years, the eatures used in standalone programs will be used on the Internet.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are a new generation of web applications that break away from the concepts on which traditional web applications are based. RIAs are more interactive and responsive than traditional web applications since RIAs allow client-side scripting (such as JavaScript) and asynchronous communication with the server (using AJAX). Although these are improvements in terms of user-friendliness, there is a big impact on our ability to automatically explore (crawl) these applications. Traditional crawling algorithms are not sufficient for crawling RIAs. We should be able to crawl RIAs in order to be able to search their content and build their models for various purposes such as reverse-engineering, detecting security vulnerabilities, assessing usability, and applying model-based testing techniques. One important problem is designing efficient crawling strategies for RIAs. It seems possible to design crawling strategies more efficient than the standard crawling strategies, the Breadth-First and the Depth-First. In this thesis, we explore the possibilities of designing efficient crawling strategies. We use a general approach that we called Model-based Crawling and present two crawling strategies that are designed using this approach. We show by experimental results that model-based crawling strategies are more efficient than the standard strategies.

The growing demand on the variety of internet applications requires management of large scale networks by efficient Quality of Service (QoS) routing, which considerably contributes to the QoS architecture. The biggest contemporary drawback in the maintenance and distribution of the global state is the increase in communication overheads. Unbalancing in the network, due to the frequent use of the links assigned to the shortest path retaining most of the network loads is regarded as a major problem for best effort service. Localised QoS routing, where the source nodes use statistics collected locally, is already described in contemporary sources as more advantageous. Scalability, however, is still one of the main concerns of existing localised QoS routing algorithms. The main aim of this thesis is to present and validate new localised algorithms in order to develop the scalability of QoS routing. Existing localised routing, Credit Based Routing (CBR) and Proportional Sticky Routing (PSR), use the blocking probability as a factor in selecting the routing paths and work with either credit or flow proportion respectively, which makes impossible having up-to-date information. Therefore our proposed Highest Minimum Bandwidth (HMB) and Highest Average Bottleneck Bandwidth History (HABBH) algorithms utilise bandwidth as the direct QoS criterion to select routing paths. We introduce an Integrated Delay Based Routing and Admission Control mechanism. Using this technique Minimum Total Delay (MTD), Low Fraction Failure (LFF) and Low Path Failure (LPF) were compared against the global QoS routing scheme, Dijkstra, and localised High Path Credit (HPC) scheme and showed superior performance. The simulation with the non-uniformly distributed traffic reduced blocking probability of the proposed algorithms. Therefore, we advocate the algorithms presented in the thesis, as a scalable approach to control large networks. We strongly suggest that bandwidth and mean delay are feasible QoS constraints to select optimal paths by locally collected information. We have demonstrated that a few good candidate paths can be selected to balance the load in the network and minimise communication overhead by applying the disjoint paths method, recalculation of candidate paths set and dynamic paths selection method. Thus, localised QoS routing can be used as a load balancing tool in order to improve the network resource utilization. A delay and bandwidth combination is one of the future prospects of our work, and the positive results presented in the thesis suggest that further development of a distributed approach in candidate paths selection may enhance the proposed localised algorithms.

The Internet is a vastly under-utilised resource, only used for half of the IT story. Describe the Internet in two words and many might say ‘sharing knowledge’. But sharing information is more accurate. It’s just that all the principle ways we use the Internet — the Web, email and media streaming — happen to be examples where information is in the form of knowledge. But IT — Information Technology — has another side: the realm of software programming where information means the dynamic control of how things work. The Internet is the driving force in the IT industry, so why isn’t it also known for sharing control? True, there are examples of specialised, one-off software applications interfacing with each other via the Internet, but there has yet to be any systematic and universal attempt to exploit the potential of the Internet for control-IT in the way we have seen it for knowledge-IT. Taking the strengths of the Web model as a starting point, this thesis proposes a parallel, dynamic world to the Web called The Mesh. In the same way that the Web seamlessly connects databases of the world to provide a global font of knowledge, the Mesh would connect software of the world to provide a global means of control. The Mesh would embody all the successful, empowering features of the Web. Everyone would have a say in how things work, mirroring Web 2.0’s user-generated content but for software instead of media. In being a universally integrated design approach for device control, the Mesh would encompass a number of research areas working on the control issue at the big picture level. It would address the problems of universal usability and ubiquitous computing. It would also provide solutions in agent-based systems and grid computing. But many features of the Mesh would simply be unique. They would change the way we go about software design, leading to new opportunities for users, programmers and manufacturers alike. The key to everything is design simplicity. A concept demonstrator has been developed as an integral part of this research project. It shows that the Mesh is both feasible and practical. Examples of programs run in the concept demonstrator are discussed, showing exactly how the Mesh would be built and how it would work. / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2007

<p>With the advent of techniques such as AJAX, the bar has been raised for what users have come to expect from web applications. However, although web application development often starts off simple, limitations in the web programming model might start to show when the business requirements become more complex. To successfully implement large-scale web application, software developers need to have knowledge of a big set of complementary technologies.</p><p>This thesis describes the implementation of a prototype of a central hotel property management system using web technologies. These technologies are then compared to an alternative set of technologies, which are used for implementing a second prototype; a stand-alone desktop client distributed using Java Web Start.</p><p>The thesis highlights some of the current problems with the web programming model and shows how the user experience can be improved by instead using desktop technologies.</p>

With the advent of techniques such as AJAX, the bar has been raised for what users have come to expect from web applications. However, although web application development often starts off simple, limitations in the web programming model might start to show when the business requirements become more complex. To successfully implement large-scale web application, software developers need to have knowledge of a big set of complementary technologies. This thesis describes the implementation of a prototype of a central hotel property management system using web technologies. These technologies are then compared to an alternative set of technologies, which are used for implementing a second prototype; a stand-alone desktop client distributed using Java Web Start. The thesis highlights some of the current problems with the web programming model and shows how the user experience can be improved by instead using desktop technologies.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have been widely used in the web over the last decade as they were found to be responsive and user-friendly compared to traditional web applications. RIAs use client-side scripting such as JavaScript which allows for asynchronous updates on the server-side using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Due to the large size of RIAs and therefore the long time required for crawling, distributed RIA crawling has been introduced with the aim to decrease the crawling time. However, the current RIA crawling systems are not scalable, i.e. they are limited to a relatively low number of crawlers. Furthermore, they do not allow for fault tolerance in case that a failure occurs in one of their components. In this research, we address the scalability and resilience problems when crawling RIAs in a distributed environment and we explore the possibilities of designing an efficient RIA crawling system that is scalable and fault-tolerant. Our approach is to partition the search space among several storage devices (distributed databases) over a peer-to-peer (P2P) network where each database is responsible for storing only a portion of the RIA graph. This makes the distributed data structure invulnerable to a single point of failure. However, accessing the distributed data required by crawlers makes the crawling task challenging when the number of crawlers becomes high. We show by simulation results and analytical reasoning that our system is scalable and fault-tolerant. Furthermore, simulation results show that the crawling time using the P2P crawling system is significantly faster than the crawling time using both the non-distributed crawling system and the distributed crawling system using a single database.