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Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are being adopted by organisations in order to integrate disparate computational assets. A major hurdle they face is the decision on how to integrate the UI in an SOA. In addition, technological advances have allowed complex applications and complex user interfaces (UIs) to be realised and the increase in accessibility to computers enables a diverse population of users with different characteristics, preferences and needs to use these complex computer applications. Adaptive user interfaces (AUIs) have been proposed as a solution to cater for the differences in user traits by adapting the UI to meet the diverse needs of users. AUIs have, however, traditionally been developed using client/server architectures This research, therefore, set out to investigate how to develop an AUI using a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In order to successfully achieve the goal of this research, literature concerning SOAs was investigated to gain an understanding of SOAs. A literature review of AUIs was also undertaken to gain an understanding of AUIs. A model-based approach was used to develop a model for UI adaptation using knowledge gained in the literature reviews. The model generates different UIs depending on various users‘ inferred level of expertise. The model describes the interaction between AUI services that use design-time documents and run-time user-interaction to adapt the UI. A prototype of the model was implemented and evaluated using an evolution strategy devised to assess different aspects of the research. The evaluation strategy proved the following: The service components of the prototype adhere to SOA design principles; The implementation was effective based on software engineering metrics; and, The implementation was usable and did not negatively affect the performance of users. The successful implementation of the prototype provides evidence that the design of AUIs using SOA is feasible. This dissertation therefore makes a contribution to the development of AUIs using SOAs. The model could be used to provide UI adaptation for business software applications.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Tecnologías de la Información / Tradicionalmente una buena parte de los ingresos de las empresas de telecomunicaciones provenía del tráfico de los servicios de voz, pero esta situación ha ido cambiando con los años y actualmente una importante fuente de ingresos proviene de los Servicios de Valor Agregado (SVA). Se definen como SVA, aquellos servicios que no forman parte de la oferta básica de voz y que son usados separadamente por el usuario final. Se utilizan como una herramienta de diferenciación con respecto a otros operadores, como medio para conseguir la lealtad de los clientes y como ya se indicó anteriormente permiten, eventualmente, desarrollar otra línea de ingresos. En la actualidad todos los operadores de servicios de telecomunicaciones tienen la necesidad urgente de desarrollar nuevos SVA para poder rentabilizar sus redes, generar mayores ingresos y enfrentar con éxito a los nuevos competidores los denominados OTT (Over The Top) quienes utilizan la infraestructura de los operadores ya establecidos para acelerar la entrega de servicios y aplicaciones innovadoras que capturan a un importante número de clientes. Para sobrevivir en este escenario, los operadores incumbentes tienen como alternativa abrir sus redes y exponer sus capacidades a través de interfaces estándar que les permitan explotar eficientemente sus activos más valiosos: la Red y la información que generan los usuarios para producir masivamente aplicaciones móviles de próxima generación. Para lograr este objetivo, se han desplegado a lo largo de los años, distintas alternativas tecnológicas que ya no son suficientes para generar nuevos ingresos. Por lo tanto se requiere un enfoque novedoso que facilite la implementación de nuevas prestaciones que entreguen al usuario final una mejor experiencia de servicio. En este contexto la contribución principal de este trabajo de tesis consistió en diseñar e implementar una plataforma centralizada basada en SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), que fusiona las tecnologías propias del dominio de las Telecomunicaciones junto con las arquitecturas provenientes del ámbito de las Tecnologías de la Información que permiten el rápido despliegue, entrega y evolución de servicios de valor agregado en su Red Móvil con el propósito de lanzar al mercado la mayor cantidad de servicios diferenciadores.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architecture which provides a single topology for business applications. SOA provides architecture for integration of several applications within or outside of organizations by reusing application components and services. Reusability is one of the mostly emphasized principles and benefits of SOA. Code reusing has been a concern for application developers. However, another way of reusability is reusing software components and services in SOA. By reusing services, a service can be used in more than one business process of service application. By considering the significance of reusability in SOA, a number of studies have been performed, to theoretically identify the factors affecting reusability in SOA. However, a research is needed to perform an empirical research to identify a set of factors affecting reusability in real business situation. The empirical study is performed by an investigation in three different companies in Sweden, which have been customers of a system integration company and have implemented SOA projects. The investigation is done by performing 5 semi-structured interviews with correspondences of those companies, to find more factors affecting reusability from their perspective. As a result, a set of factors derived from the empirical study is identified which reflects the ideas of practitioners in business. By performing a qualitative approach and comparing the factors derived from the empirical study to factors derived from literature study, it is concluded that academic factors constitute just around 40 percent of factors found in business, and they are mostly technical factors. The rest of factors are new factors based on experience of practitioners in business. The new factors are mostly business oriented factors, and have emerged since 2008, when earlier works are performed. Due to the recent maturity of SOA in organizations, the factors affecting reusability have changed, especially during the last four years.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Patients and providers need to exchange medical records. Electronic Health Records and Health Information Exchanges leave a patient’s health record fragmented and controlled by the provider. This thesis proposes a Peer-to-Peer Personal Health Record network that can be extended with third-party services. This design enables patient control of health records and the tracing of exchanges. Additionally, as a demonstration of the functionality of a potential third-party, a Hypertension Predictor is developed using MEPS data and deployed as a service in the proposed framework.

Forecasting has its application in various domains as the decision-makers are provided with a more predictable and reliable estimate of events that are yet to occur. Typically, a user would invest in licensed software or subscribe to a monthly or yearly plan in order to make such forecasts. The framework presented here differs from conventional software in forecasting, as it allows any interested party to use the proposed services on a pay-per-use basis so that they can avoid investing heavily in the required infrastructure. The Framework-as-a-Service (FaaS) presented here uses Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to implement Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). For forecasting, collection of data, its analysis and forecasting responsibilities lies with users, who have to put together other tools or software in order to produce a forecast. FaaS offers each of these responsibilities as a service, namely, External Data Collection Framework (EDCF), Internal Data Retrieval Framework (IDRF) and Forecast Generation Framework (FGF). FaaS Controller, being a composite service based on the above three, is responsible for coordinating activities between them. These services are accessible through Economic Endpoint (EE) or Technical Endpoint (TE) that can be used by a remote client in order to obtain cost or perform a forecast, respectively. The use of Cloud Computing makes these services available over the network to be used as software to forecast energy for solar or wind resources. These services can also be used as a platform to create new services by merging existing functionality with new service features for forecasting. Eventually, this can lead to faster development of newer services where a user can choose which services to use and pay for, presenting the use of FaaS as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) in forecasting. / Master of Science

Interpretar a enorme quantidade de dados coletados, entender as causas e propor estratégias para gerenciar a variabilidade do campo, freqüentemente são apontados como alguns dos principais problemas para o avanço da agricultura de precisão, AP. Os sistemas de informação tornam-se fundamentais na solução desses problemas, mas apesar de existirem muitos pacotes de software disponíveis no mercado, variando de muito simples a muito sofisticados e diversos sistemas originados de experiências de pesquisas, a natureza proprietária e monolítica das soluções impedem o uso em larga escala. A AP envolve uma grande variedade de técnicas de análise, fontes e formatos de dados, perfis de usuário, e muitos outros aspectos que tornam uma aplicação muito complexa do ponto de vista da engenharia de software. Com o objetivo de fornecer a base para o desenvolvimento de sistemas de informação para AP baseados em padrões abertos e plataformas de software livre, uma infra-estrutura de desenvolvimento de sistemas de informação para a agricultura de precisão é proposta. Com base nas idéias seminais dessa proposta, são desenvolvidos protótipos para a condução de experimentos, os quais exploram caminhos de evolução para a infra-estrutura, com especial atenção sobre aspectos de arquitetura de software. Como estudo de caso, uma aplicação web que realiza filtragem de dados de monitores de produtividade é apresentada. Usando a metodologia de desenvolvimento em espiral, sucessivas versões dessa aplicação foram criadas e os resultados usados para propor melhoramentos à infra-estrutura. A infra-estrutura final contém cinco componentes: uma arquitetura de referência para sistemas de informação orientados a serviços para AP, uma linguagem padrão para troca de dados entre serviços agrícolas, um barramento para conexão de serviços agrícolas, um provedor de serviços geoespaciais e um portal para serviços agrícolas. Ela se mostrou adequada para a criação de sistemas de informação para AP interoperáveis, de baixo custo e com capacidade de evolução, mudando o paradigma dos sistemas para AP preponderantemente proprietários e monolíticos para abertos e orientados a serviços distribuídos. / Interpreting the huge amount of data collected, understanding the causes and being able to propose sound strategies for the field variability management are frequently pointed out as major issues for the advance of precision agriculture. Therefore, the information systems become fundamental for the solution of these problems. Although there are many available software packages in the market, varying from simple to very sophisticated and diverse systems deriving from experiences of research, the monolithic and proprietary nature of the solutions hinder their use in wide scale. Precision agriculture involves a great variety of techniques of data analysis, data sources, data formats, user profiles, and many other aspects that make it a complex application from the software engineering point of view. Aiming to supply the base for the development of open standards-based precision agriculture information systems and free software platforms, an infrastructure for developing precision agriculture information systems is proposed. Based on the fundamentals of that proposal, prototypes are developed which explore different evolutionary paths for the infrastructure, with special attention to software architecture aspects. As a case study, a yield monitor data filtering web application is presented. Using the spiral development methodology, successive versions of this application were created and the results used to improve the infrastructure. The final infrastructure contains five components: a service-oriented reference architecture for precision agriculture information systems, a standard language for data exchange between agricultural services, a service bus for connecting agricultural services, a geospatial services provider, and an agricultural services portal. It revealed to be adequate for the creation of precision agriculture interoperable systems, of low cost and with capacity for evolution, moving the paradigm of systems for AP preponderantly monolithic and proprietary to open and distributed service-oriented.

A indústria de desenvolvimento de software está em constante evolução e em busca de novos desafios, como por exemplo: novas tecnologias, linguagens de programação e estratégias para aumentar a produtividade no desenvolvimento. Com o passar do tempo, essa evolução desejada tem se concretizado, em especial com o surgimento de conceitos como Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) e Model-Driven Development (MDD). Nesse contexto, ganha importância a reutilização de software, por exemplo por meio do uso de serviços que facilitam a interoperabilidade entre diferentes sistemas. Ambientes de desenvolvimento de software, em especial ambientes de reúso de software, poderiam se adequar à arquitetura SOA para facilitar a disponibilização de serviços a outros ambientes, promovendo sua integração e aumentando a possibilidade de reúso. Após um levantamento bibliográfico sobre ambientes integrados de reúso que utilizassem serviços para permitir o compartilhamento de recursos, percebeu-se que os trabalhos nessa direção são poucos. Ao mesmo tempo, observou-se que para integração de sistemas por meio de serviços é necessário criar camadas de acesso às entidades dos sistemas que compartilharão informações. A implementação desses serviços de forma manual é repetitiva e sujeita a erros, principalmente por programadores que não estão familiarizados com SOA. Por outro lado, diagramas de classes em UML (Unified Modeling Language) são de amplo conhecimento por parte de desenvolvedores e estão em um nível de abstração que é suficientemente detalhado para permitir a derivação de serviços de acesso às suas classes. Desta forma, para atender uma demanda crescente de sistemas que precisam oferecer serviços para possibilitar sua integração com outros sistemas, este mestrado tem por objetivo promover a geração automatizada de código de serviços por meio de transformações de modelo para texto, em que o modelo de entrada é um diagrama de classes derivado da UML e os serviços gerados cobrem operações básicas do tipo CRUD. O gerador resultante foi validado por meio de duas provas de conceito e mostrou-se adequado para cumprir os objetivos estabelecidos, visto que o desenvolvedor trabalha com um modelo em alto nível de abstração, não precisando conhecer os detalhes inerentes à implementação dos serviços. / The software development industry is constantly evolving and looking for challenges, such as: new technologies, programming languages and strategies to increase developers productivity. During the course of time, this required evolution has been concretized, especially with the emergency of concepts such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Model-Driven Development (MDD). In this context, software reuse gains importance, for example through the use of services that ease the interoperability of different systems. Software development environments, in special reuse environments, could be adapted to the SOA architecture to ease the availability of services to other environments, thus promoting its integration and possibility of reuse. After a literature review about integrated reuse environments that use services to allow resources sharing, it has been observed that there are only a few works in this direction. At the same time, it was observed that for system integration through services it is required to create an access layer for the system entities that share information. The manual implementation of these services is repetitive and error prone, especially for programmers who are not familiar with SOA. On the other hand, UML (Unified Modeling Language) class diagrams are widely known by developers and are at a level of abstraction that is sufficiently detailed to allow the derivation of access services to their classes. Thus, to meet a growing demand for systems that need to provide services to enable its integration with other systems, this masters dissertation aims to promote the automated generation of service code through transformations from model to text, where the input model is a class diagram derived from UML, and the generated services cover the basic CRUD operations. The resulting generator has been validated through two proofs of concepts and was adequate to meet the stated objectives, as the developer works with a model in a high abstraction level, and does not need to know the details related with the service implementation.

Service-orientation and the underlying concept of service-oriented architectures are a means to successfully address the need for flexibility and interoperability of software applications, which in turn leads to improved IT support of business processes. With a growing level of diffusion, sophistication and maturity, the number of services and interdependencies is gradually rising. This increasingly requires companies to implement a systematic management of services along their entire lifecycle. Service lifecycle management (SLM), i.e., the management of services from the initiating idea to their disposal, is becoming a crucial success factor. Not surprisingly, the academic and practice communities increasingly postulate comprehensive IT support for SLM to counteract the inherent complexity. The topic is still in its infancy, with no comprehensive models available that help evaluating and designing IT support in SLM. This thesis presents a reference architecture for SLM and applies it to the evaluation and designing of SLM IT support in companies. The artifact, which largely resulted from consortium research efforts, draws from an extensive analysis of existing SLM applications, case studies, focus group discussions, bilateral interviews and existing literature. Formal procedure models and a configuration terminology allow adapting and applying the reference architecture to a company’s individual setting. Corresponding usage examples prove its applicability and demonstrate the arising benefits within various SLM IT support design and evaluation tasks. A statistical analysis of the knowledge embodied within the reference data leads to novel, highly significant findings. For example, contemporary standard applications do not yet emphasize the lifecycle concept but rather tend to focus on small parts of the lifecycle, especially on service operation. This forces user companies either into a best-of-breed or a custom-development strategy if they are to implement integrated IT support for their SLM activities. SLM software vendors and internal software development units need to undergo a paradigm shift in order to better reflect the numerous interdependencies and increasing intertwining within services’ lifecycles. The SLM architecture is a first step towards achieving this goal.

De teknologiska framstegen inom mobiltelefoni de senaste åren, har bidragit till att människor kan utföra sysslor oberoende av plats. För företag som tillhandahåller webbtjänster är mobila applikationer någonting som kan utnyttjas för att öka användning av deras tjänst. I uppsatsen undersöks om detta stämmer eller ej.För företag blir det viktigt hur en mobil applikation integreras mot den befintliga webbtjänsten. Det är dessutom relevant för företag att veta hur applikationen påverkar användningen av den initiala webbtjänsten.I studien utvecklas en mobil applikation från grunden för att se vilka potentiella problem företag kan stöta på vid utveckling av en mobil applikation. Intervjuer görs med företag som utvecklat mobila applikationer till befintliga webbtjänster, för att undersöka hur de upplevt effekterna av applikationen efter lansering.Resultaten visar att lansering av en mobil applikation ofta görs till mer än en typ av mobiltelefon. För att underlätta integration av mobila applikationer mot företagets tjänst, undersöks i uppsatsen vilka förutsättningar som krävs av det underliggande systemet. Med en flexibel arkitektur kan företaget vid vidare utveckling spara resurser.Vidare visar resultaten att tjänster i helhet ser ökad användning vid implementering av en mobil applikation. Funktioner i tjänster tenderar dessutom att delas upp mellan den mobila applikationen och webbtjänsten. / The technological advancements in the mobile technology industry have enabled people to perform tasks regardless of time or place. For companies that provide web services, mobile applications can boost service usage. In this thesis we examine if the usage of a service tends to increase in general, by using mobile applications.For companies it is important to know how mobile applications can be integrated with an existing web service. It is also relevant to know about the mobile applications’ effects on the usage of the initial web service.In this study a mobile application is developed from scratch in order to explore potential difficulties that companies can run into while developing a mobile application. Interviews are made with companies that provide web services to their customers, in order to get answers on how mobile applications have affected usage of their respective web services.Results show that the launch of a mobile application is often done towards more than one mobile platform. In the study, we investigate which requirements that has to be met to ease integration of a mobile application to an existing web service. By implementing flexible back-end system architecture, companies can save resources for future development. Furthermore, results show that services in general tend to see increased usage after a mobile application has been launched. Service-specific functionality also tends to get split up between the mobile application and the initial web service.