Mobile web browsers of today have many of the same capabilities as their desktop counterparts. However, among the capabilities they lack is a way for web applications to interact with local devices. While today’s mobile phones commonly include GPS receivers and digital cameras, these local devices are currently not accessible from within the browser. The only means of utilizing these devices is by using standalone applications, but such applications lack the versatility of web browsers. If a mobile browser could utilize these local devices, then a mobile application could run within the browser, thus avoiding the need for specialized client software. This thesis suggests an approach for adding such capabilities to mobile browsers. In the proposed method, scripted access to local device functionality is facilitated by a local Java application. This application acts as a proxy server and allows the browser to call methods exposed by the local Java APIs. Both the benefits and some security concerns of this approach are examined. The benefits are further highlighted through two example web applications which utilize local devices. / I dagens mobila webbläsare återfinns det mesta av funktionaliteten från webbläsare för datorer. Det som dock fortfarande saknas är möjligheten för webbapplikationer att komma åt lokala telefonfunktioner. Dagens mobiltelefoner är ofta utrustade med GPS-mottagare och digitalkameror, men dessa kan för närvarande ej nås från webbläsaren. Det enda sättet att utnyttja dessa inbyggda funktioner är genom separata applikationer, men sådana applikationer är inte lika mångsidiga som webbläsare. Om en mobil webbläsare kunde utnyttja de inbyggda funktionerna, så skulle en mobil applikation kunna köras i webbläsaren istället för att ha separat klientprogramvara. Det här examensarbetet föreslår ett sätt att ge denna möjlighet till mobila webbläsare. I den föreslagna metoden används en lokal Java-applikation för att ge tillgång till inbyggda funktioner via skript. Denna applikation fungerar som en proxy-server och låter webbläsaren anropa metoder exponerade av lokala Java-API. Både fördelar och några säkerhetsproblem med den här lösningen undersöks. Fördelarna visas ytterligare genom två exempel på webbapplikationer som utnyttjar inbyggda telefonfunktioner.

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.

Testing the reliability of an application usually requires a good usage model that accurately captures the likely sequences of inputs that the application will receive from the environment. The models being used in the literature are mostly based on Markov chains. They are used to generate test cases that are statistically close to what the applica-tion is expected to receive when in production. In this thesis, we propose a model for reli-ability testing that is created directly from the log file of a web application. Our proposed model is also based on Markov chains and has two components: one component, based on a modified tree, captures the most frequent behaviors, while the other component is another Markov chain that captures infrequent behaviors. The result is a statistically cor-rect model that shows clearly what most users do on the site. The thesis also presents an evaluation method for estimating the accuracy of vari-ous reliability-testing usage models. The method is based on comparison between ob-served users’ traces and traces inferred from the usage model. Our method gauges the accuracy of the reliability-testing usage model by calculating the sum of goodness-of-fit values of each traces and scaling the result between 0 and 1. Finally, we present an experimental study on the log of a real web site and discuss the way to use proposed usage model to generate test sequences, as well as strength and weakness of the model for reliability testing.

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.

Content management systems allow easy creation and management of web pages even without expert skills. Thesis describes application of these systems at Customs Administration of Czech republic and proposes serie of steps required to migrate web pages from one system to another. Framework for developing web applications enables to integrate these applications into content management system and extend its functionalities.

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.

Submitted by Geyciane Santos (geyciane_thamires@hotmail.com) on 2015-06-17T14:51:52Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação- Prsicila Silva Fernandes.pdf: 8682442 bytes, checksum: cf742a434c25244708ee5ed78c8e4718 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2015-06-17T20:42:53Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação- Prsicila Silva Fernandes.pdf: 8682442 bytes, checksum: cf742a434c25244708ee5ed78c8e4718 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2015-06-17T20:43:53Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação- Prsicila Silva Fernandes.pdf: 8682442 bytes, checksum: cf742a434c25244708ee5ed78c8e4718 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-06-17T20:43:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação- Prsicila Silva Fernandes.pdf: 8682442 bytes, checksum: cf742a434c25244708ee5ed78c8e4718 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-02-08 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / In recent years, Web applications have been intensive used in current society, and their user population comprises since young kids to elderly individuals. The success of Web applications can be determined by two features: their fast evolution and their usability. Despite the great evolution of Web applications, users often face errors while using them, caused by not intuitive interfaces. A large proportion of this problem is on the development process of these applications, which sometimes does not embody usability principals and methods. Usability evaluations on Web development processes are often avoided by industry professionals due to their lack of experience in the field. Also, usability evaluation can be expensive in terms of time and human resources. Our motivation consists on assist novice inspectors, such as developers with little knowledge on usability, improving the quality of their Web applications by producing better interfaces, with a lower cost. We developed a new usability inspection technique, called WE-QT (Web Evaluation Question Technique). The WE-QT technique was specifically tailored for usability evaluation of Web applications for novice inspectors. Our technique uses a question based approach to guide the inspectors uncovering usability problems. We adopted an experimental methodology to develop WE-QT. This thesis describes the WE-QT’s creation, a feasibility study and two observational studies. Our goal is to increase the quality of Web applications and improve the user’s interaction in this technology. / Nos últimos anos, aplicações Web têm sido amplamente utilizadas na sociedade, e sua população de usuários compreende desde crianças jovens a idosos. O sucesso das aplicações da Web pode ser determinado por duas características: sua rápida evolução e sua usabilidade. Apesar da grande evolução das aplicações Web, os usuários muitas vezes se deparam com erros ao utilizá-las, causados por interfaces não intuitivas. Grande parte deste problema está no processo de desenvolvimento destas aplicações, que às vezes não incorporam princípios e métodos de usabilidade. Avaliações de usabilidade nos processos de desenvolvimento são muitas vezes evitadas por profissionais da indústria, devido à sua falta de experiência na área, e avaliações de usabilidade podem ser caras em termos de tempo e de recursos humanos. A motivação deste trabalho consiste em ajudar os inspetores novatos, tais como desenvolvedores com pouco conhecimento em usabilidade, a melhorar a qualidade de suas aplicações Web, com um custo menor. Foi desenvolvida uma nova técnica de inspeção de usabilidade, chamada WE-QT (Web Evaluation Question Technique). A técnica WE-QT foi desenvolvida especificamente para avaliação de usabilidade de aplicações Web por inspetores novatos. A WE-QT utiliza uma abordagem baseada em perguntas para orientar os inspetores a detectar defeitos de usabilidade. Foi adotada uma metodologia experimental para desenvolver WE-QT. Esta dissertação descreve a criação da WE-QT, um estudo de viabilidade e dois estudos de observação. Nosso objetivo é aumentar a qualidade de aplicações Web e melhorar a interação do usuário nesta tecnologia.