This diploma thesis brings a look at the relatively new technology Microsoft Silverlight, which is a new platform for developing Rich Internet Applications (RIA). It contains features and principles of Silverlight technology in a context of several other technologies. As a part of this work, there is a practical project developed in Microsoft Silverlight 2.0, which is used as a demonstration of described principals and techniques in a theoretical part. The goal of this work is to provide the best possible and complete description of Silverlight's features, advantages, but also limitations. In the thesis there can be also found comparisons with related technology Microsoft Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) and also with other competitors on a RIA market.

The Internet today has a phenomenal reach---right into the homes of a vast audience worldwide. Some organisations (and individuals) see this medium as a good opportunity for extending the reach of their computer systems. One popular approach used for such endeavours is to run an application on a server, using web technology for displaying its user interface (UI) remotely. Developing such a web-based UI can be quite tedious---it is a concurrent, distributed program which has to run in a hostile environment. Furthermore, the platform on which it is implemented (the web) was not originally intended for such usage. A web framework is a collection of software components which provides its users with support for developing and executing web-based UIs. In part, web frameworks can be seen as being analogous to interpreters: given a specification of a UI using a specification technique dictated by the framework, server components of the framework can present the UI using web technology. Topics related to web frameworks are scarce in the academic literature, but abound in industry and open discussion forums. Similarly, the designers of web frameworks seldom found their work on existing theory in the literature. This study is an attempt to bridge this gap. It is focused on two aspects of web frameworks: the specification technique a framework mandates, and how such a specification can subsequently be used to present a UI via web technology. As part of this study, a survey was conducted of 80 open source web frameworks. Based on the survey, a partial overview of the domain of web frameworks is given, covering what is seen as being typically required of a web framework and covering specification techniques that are used by existing frameworks. Two taxonomies are proposed of the strategies web frameworks use for specifying two aspects of web UIs. Using the web as platform implies adherence to certain (intended) architectural constraints. Web framework designers often strain against these constraints. However, another point of view is to recognise that the success of the web platform is made possible precisely because of its intended architecture. (And the success of the web is surely the principal motivation for using it for remote UIs in the first place.) With the bias of this viewpoint, a specification technique is proposed for web-based UIs. This technique is based on the well-known formalism of statecharts, with semantics explicitly defined in terms of the intended architectural components and constraints of the web. The design of a web framework for presenting a UI so specified is also proposed (based on the theoretical background given, as well as two prototype implementations which have been developed). / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Computer Science / unrestricted

Includes bibliographical references / Although learning management systems (LMSs) have been widely adopted by universities in developing countries, their potential to support students' learning has not been fully exploited due to several factors. Some of the factors limiting the more successful implementation of LMSs in developing country universities have been identified and reported in this study. Most importantly, LMS implementation in developing country universities is constrained by limited institutional ICT infrastructures, Internet bandwidth and electricity outages that affect the accessibility of LMS services by the students. The main research question addressed in this study is: How can we better use the available ICTs and ICT infrastructure in developing country universities to enhance the accessibility of the LMS services by students to better support the implementation of LMSs? The research question was addressed through surveys and experimentation. Two surveys were carried out, and the findings of these surveys were useful in: understanding the current state of practice in LMS implementation in developing country universities; defining the problem; understanding the students' LMS expectations and needs; and deciding the nature of the intervention to be implemented. Through the surveys, it was established that the majority of students in the surveyed universities possessed mobile phones, most of which being internet enabled phones. The study therefore explored the possibility of enabling and enhancing mobile access for LMS services so as to enhance students' LMS accessibility through their mobile phones. The design, development, implementation and evaluation of the intervention (the mobile LMS) were achieved through a user-centred development approach that included participatory design, prototyping and user experience evaluation. An impact evaluation of the mobile LMS intervention indicated that: mobile LMS interfaces can lead to students' increased access and use of the LMS through mobile phones; students prefer streamlined mobile LMS interfaces with fewer and block-based services; with streamlined mobile LMS interfaces, students are able to get the LMS services they need on their mobile phones without the need for desktop and laptop computers and without the need for the full desktop LMS interfaces. While the streamlined mobile LMS allows the students an opportunity to more satisfactorily access the LMS services through their mobile phones, it also takes away the pressure from the constrained institutional ICT infrastructure and facilities such as computer laboratories. The design and development process of the mobile LMS intervention highlighted that students' involvement leads to creation of more usable and useful mobile LMS interfaces and that most of the students' mobile LMS needs can be achieved through a cross-platform mobile Web application.

HydroShare is a collaborative online system being developed by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc. (CUAHSI) with the goal of facilitating the dissemination, visualization, and publishing of hydrologic data and models. External web applications serve a key role in extending HydroShare's capabilities, so robust application programming interfaces (APIs) are a vital component of HydroShare's architecture. Hydrologic data stored on HydroShare are defined by a data type, and much of these data are either geospatial or time series data. Although HydroShare's API provides ways to upload and download files, as well as access certain metadata, it does not currently provide GIS services defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium, or Hydrologic Information System (HIS) services developed by CUAHSI. The absence of these services severely limits the capabilities of HydroShare apps while also increasing the development time and complexity of apps that are developed.To help alleviate this disconnect between HydroShare and HydroShare apps, I have developed a system which helps extend HydroShare's data service capabilities using GeoServer and a Water Data Server to expose GIS and HIS data services for HydroShare content. With this system in place, HydroShare apps have much better access to HydroShare content, allowing them to be developed in less time, and provide much more powerful visualization, access, and analysis services to HydroShare users.

Cuando una startup sale al mercado, se enfoca en crecer exponencialmente, utilizando una idea innovadora y un presupuesto relativamente bajo. Este crecimiento exponencial se apoya en la tecnología, la cual debe manejar un rendimiento adecuado en los recursos de hardware para los servicios, acorde con el giro del negocio. El objetivo principal de este trabajo es realizar un análisis de una plataforma para aplicaciones web con una arquitectura basada en contenedores, que sea capaz de soportar el crecimiento exponencial de usuarios de sus servicios Web. Las arquitecturas tradicionales basadas en servidores físicos implican tiempos y costos de configuración, despliegue y mantenimiento que son altos. Cuando se hace necesario escalar, se requiere, normalmente, de más recursos de hardware y de tiempo para realizar las configuraciones necesarias. La flexibilidad que provee la virtualización de servidores agiliza los procedimientos de escalamiento y reduce considerablemente el tiempo y los costos, comparados con las soluciones basadas solamente en hardware. Sin embargo, para atender requerimientos más exigentes, la virtualización tiene una huella muy pesada y tiempos de despliegue todavía elevados. La tecnología de contenedores nos ofrece una plataforma liviana y eficiente. Un contenedor es un paquete ejecutable muy liviano que aísla una pieza de software, incluyendo todo lo necesario para ser ejecutado. Está claro que la velocidad y la eficiencia son las mayores necesidades para las startups, y Docker, uno de los líderes en el mercado de contenedores de software, es capaz de proporcionarlas de manera efectiva. Si bien es cierto no ha reemplazado a las máquinas virtuales, se está notando el potencial de Docker. Eso no quiere decir que las máquinas virtuales quedaran obsoletas, por el contrario, Docker y las máquinas virtuales coexistirán uno al lado del otro, dando a los startups más opciones para ejecutar sus aplicaciones en la nube. / When a startup goes to market, it focuses on growing exponentially, using an innovative idea and a relatively low budget. This exponential growth is supported by technology, which must handle adequate performance in the hardware resources for services, in accordance with the line of business. The main objective of this work is to carry out an analysis of a platform for web applications with a container-based architecture, which is capable of supporting the exponential growth of users of its Web services. Traditional physical server-based architectures involve high configuration, deployment, and maintenance times and costs. When scaling becomes necessary, it usually takes more hardware and time to complete the necessary configurations. The flexibility that server virtualization provides streamlines escalation procedures and greatly reduces time and cost, compared to hardware-only solutions. However, to meet more demanding requirements, virtualization has a very heavy footprint and still high deployment times. Container technology offers us a lightweight and efficient platform. A container is a very lightweight executable package that isolates a piece of software, including everything needed to be run. It is clear that speed and efficiency are the greatest needs for startups, and Docker, one of the leaders in the software container market, is capable of providing them effectively. While it's true it hasn't replaced virtual machines, Docker's potential is being noticed. That doesn't mean that virtual machines will become obsolete, on the contrary, Docker and virtual machines will coexist side by side, giving startups more options to run their applications in the cloud. / Tesis

A key challenge of current multi-user web applications is to provide users with interesting events and information in real-time. This research reviews the most common real-time web techniques to identify drawbacks while exploring solutions to improve simplicity, efficiency, and compatibility within a client-server environment. Two solutions are proposed for enhancing the efficiency of real-time web techniques by reducing client-server communication. First, a model of browser monitoring control observes the browser activity and decides if to postpone client-server communication in the case of inactive tabs. This model was implemented and tested with results demonstrating that a significant number of client-server connections can be avoided in the browser background. These results suggest the solution can be optimised for any real-time technique as it benefits from being a developer side technique that works consistently on all browsers. Second, ‘Adaptive Polling’ is a pull-based real-time web technique to overcome bandwidth issues of the reverse AJAX method of ‘Polling’ by controlling the frequency of requesting updates from the server based on the last server response. This approach is implemented and tested with results showing how a significant number of redundant connections can be avoided while the server does not return updates. This solution is a good alternative to other real-time web techniques as it features low latency, the simplicity of implementation, and compatibility with all browsers and servers.

Traditionally, knowledge management tool design has fit into the repository paradigm: a database of stored information that can be queried by an individual seeking information. These tools often rely on two distinct user groups: those who produce the knowledge and those who seek it. The disparity between these two groups - one group benefiting from the other group's work - is a leading cause of a knowledge management tool's failure. Additionally, knowledge management tools fail because the work processes of target users are not fully understood and therefore not addressed in the tool design. Developing knowledge management tools for educators presents additional obstacles in this already hazardous environment. The traditional impediments found in the development of knowledge management systems, such as trust and incentive concerns, are present along with additional concerns faced by educators such as strict time and resource constraints. And like teaching, educators have different impressions of how knowledge management practices should be done. Therefore, any knowledge management tool for educators must address these obstacles in order to be effective. This research describes the development of an activity-centric knowledge management tool. Activity-centric knowledge management tools avoid the repository paradigm by focusing on the processes in which work is done rather than the storing of information that results from such work. This approach to knowledge management in an educational environment allows teachers to focus on the work involved in teaching rather than knowledge management itself which typically involves added tasks such as entering information into a database. First, I describe current knowledge management practices of teachers by reviewing literature from education and knowledge management as well as interviews and surveys of teachers regarding how they incorporate knowledge management into their teaching practices. Next, I examine the development of the Survey Data Visualization Tool, an activity-based knowledge management tool. Finally, I analyze the use of the Survey Data Visualization Tool by a group of teachers. / Master of Science

Developing interactive web application systems requires a large amount of effort on designing database, system logic and user interface. These tasks are expensive and error-prone. Web application systems are accessed and used by many different sets of people with different backgrounds and numerous demands. Meeting these demands requires frequent updating for Web application systems which results in a very high cost process. Thus, many attempts have been made to automate, to some degree, the construction of Web user interfaces. Three main directions have been cited for this purpose. The first direction suggested of generating user interfaces from the application's data model. This path was able to generate the static layout of user interfaces with dynamic behaviour specified programmatically. The second tendency suggested deployment of the domain model to generate both, the layout of a user interface and its dynamic behaviour. Web applications built based on this approach are most useful for domain-specific interfaces with a relatively fixed user dialogue. The last direction adopted the notion of deploying database metadata to developing dynamic user interfaces. Although the notion was quite valuable, its deployment did not present a generic solution for generating a variety of types of dynamic Web user interface targeting several platforms and electronic devices. This thesis has inherited the latter direction and presented significant improvements on the current deployment of this tendency. This thesis aims to contribute towards the development of an abstract framework to generate abstract and dynamic Web user interfaces not targeted to any particular domain or platform. To achieve this target, the thesis proposed and evaluates a general notion for implementing a prototype system that uses an internal model (i.e. database metadata) in conjunction with XML technology. Database metadata is richer than any external model and provides the information needed to build dynamic user interfaces. In addition, XML technology became the mainstream of presenting and storing data in an abstract structure. It is widely adopted in Web development society because of its ability to be transformed into many different formats with a little bit of effort. This thesis finds that only Java can provide us with a generalised database metadata based framework. Other programming languages apply some restrictions on accessing and extracting database metadata from numerous database management systems. Consequently, JavaServlets and relational database were used to implement the proposed framework. In addition, Java Data Base Connectivity was used to bridge the two mentioned technologies. The implementation of our proposed approach shows that it is possible and very straightforward to produce different automatic and dynamic Web entry forms that not targeted at any platform. In addition, this approach can be applied to a particular domain without affecting the main notion or framework architecture. The implemented approach demonstrates a number of advantages over the other approaches based on external or internal models.

Web services have made many kinds of data and computing services available. However, to use web services often requires significant programming efforts and thus limits the people who can take advantage of them to only a small group of skilled programmers. In this dissertation, I will present a tool called Gneiss that extends the spreadsheet model to support four challenging aspects of using web services: programming two-way data communications with web services, creating interactive GUI applications that use web data sources, using hierarchical data, and using live streaming data. Gneiss contributes innovations in spreadsheet languages, spreadsheet user interfaces and interaction techniques to allow programming tasks that currently require writing complex, lengthy code to instead be done using familiar spreadsheet mechanisms. Spreadsheets are arguably the most successful and popular data tools among people of all programming levels. This work advances the use of spreadsheets to new domains and could benefit a wide range of users from professional programmers to end-user programmers.

Context: This thesis deals with the robustness testing of web applications on a different web browser using a Selenium WebDriver to automate the browser. To increase the efficiency of this automation testing, we are using a robustness method. Robustness method is a process of testing the behaviour of a system implementation under exceptional execution conditions to check if it still fulfils some robustness requirements. These robustness tests often apply random algorithms to select the actions to be executed on web applications. The search-based technique was used to automatically generate effective test cases, consisting of initial conditions and fault sequences. The success criteria in most cases: "if it does not crash or hang application, then it is robust". Problem: Software testing consumes a lot of time, labour-intensive to write test cases and expensive in a software development life cycle. There was always a need for software testing to decrease the testing time. Manual testing requires a lot of effort and hard work if we measure in terms of person per month [1]. To overcome this problem, we are using a search-based approach for robustness testing of web applications which can dramatically reduce the human effort, time and the costs related to testing. Objective: The purpose of this thesis is to develop an automated approach to carry out robustness testing of web applications focusing on revealing defects related to a sequence of events triggered by a web system. To do so, we will employ search-based techniques (e.g., NSGA-II algorithm [1]). The main focus is on Ericsson Digital BSS systems, with a special focus on robustness testing. The main purpose of this master thesis is to investigate how automated robustness testing can be done so that the effort of keeping the tests up to date is minimized when the functionality of the application changes. This kind of automation testing is well depended on the structure of the product being tested. In this thesis, the test object was structured in a way, which made the testing method simple for fault revelation and less time-consuming. Method: For this approach, a meta-heuristic search-based genetic algorithm is used to make efficiency for robustness testing of the web application. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of this proposed approach, the experimental procedure is adapted. For this, an experimental testbed is set up. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is measured by two objectives: Fault revelation, Test sequence length. The effectiveness is also measured by evaluating the feasible cost-effective output test cases. i Results:The results we collected from our approach shows that by reducing the test sequence length we can reduce the time consuming and by using the NSGA-2 algorithm we found as many faults as we can when we tested on web applications in Ericsson. Conclusion: The attempt of testing of web applications, was partly succeeded. This kind of robustness testing in our approach was strongly depended on the algorithm we are using. We can conclude that by using these two objectives, we can reduce the cost of testing and time consuming.