Developing rich Web applications can be a complex job - especially when it comes to mobile device support. Web-based environments such as Lively Webwerkstatt can help developers implement such applications by making the development process more direct and interactive. Further the process of developing software is collaborative which creates the need that the development environment offers collaboration facilities. This report describes extensions of the webbased development environment Lively Webwerkstatt such that it can be used in a mobile environment. The extensions are collaboration mechanisms, user interface adaptations but as well event processing and performance measuring on mobile devices.
Defining Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) through functional abstractions can reduce the complexity that arises from mutable abstractions. Recent examples, such as Facebook's React GUI framework have shown, how modelling the view as a functional projection from the application state to a visual representation can reduce the number of interacting objects and thus help to improve the reliabiliy of the system. This however comes at the price of a more rigid, functional framework where programmers are forced to express visual entities with functional abstractions, detached from the way one intuitively thinks about the physical world. In contrast to that, the GUI Framework Morphic allows interactions in the graphical domain, such as grabbing, dragging or resizing of elements to evolve an application at runtime, providing liveness and directness in the development workflow. Modelling each visual entity through mutable abstractions however makes it difficult to ensure correctness when GUIs start to grow more complex. Furthermore, by evolving morphs at runtime through direct manipulation we diverge more and more from the symbolic description that corresponds to the morph. Given that both of these approaches have their merits and problems, is there a way to combine them in a meaningful way that preserves their respective benefits? As a solution for this problem, we propose to lift Morphic's concept of direct manipulation from the mutation of state to the transformation of source code. In particular, we will explore the design, implementation and integration of a bidirectional mapping between the graphical representation and a functional and declarative symbolic description of a graphical user interface within a self hosted development environment. We will present Transmorphic, a functional take on the Morphic GUI Framework, where the visual and structural properties of morphs are defined in a purely functional, declarative fashion. In Transmorphic, the developer is able to assemble different morphs at runtime through direct manipulation which is automatically translated into changes in the code of the application. In this way, the comprehensiveness and predictability of direct manipulation can be used in the context of a purely functional GUI, while the effects of the manipulation are reflected in a medium that is always in reach for the programmer and can even be used to incorporate the source transformations into the source files of the application.
Version control is a widely used practice among software developers. It reduces the risk of changing their software and allows them to manage different configurations and to collaborate with others more efficiently. This is amplified by code sharing platforms such as GitHub or Bitbucket. Most version control systems track files (e.g., Git, Mercurial, and Subversion do), but some programming environments do not operate on files, but on objects instead (many Smalltalk implementations do). Users of such environments want to use version control for their objects anyway. Specialized version control systems, such as the ones available for Smalltalk systems (e.g., ENVY/Developer and Monticello), focus on a small subset of objects that can be versioned. Most of these systems concentrate on the tracking of methods, classes, and configurations of these. Other user-defined and user-built objects are either not eligible for version control at all, tracking them involves complicated workarounds, or a fixed, domain-unspecific serialization format is used that does not equally suit all kinds of objects. Moreover, these version control systems that are specific to a programming environment require their own code sharing platforms;popular, well-established platforms for file-based version control systems cannot be used or adapter solutions need to be implemented and maintained. To improve the situation for version control of arbitrary objects, a framework for tracking, converting, and storing of objects is presented in this report. It allows editions of objects to be stored in an exchangeable, existing backend version control system. The platforms of the backend version control system can thus be reused. Users and objects have control over how objects are captured for the purpose of version control. Domain-specific requirements can be implemented. The storage format (i.e. the file format, when file-based backend version control systems are used) can also vary from one object to another. Different editions of objects can be compared and sets of changes can be applied to graphs of objects. A generic way for capturing and restoring that supports most kinds of objects is described. It models each object as a collection of slots. Thus, users can begin to track their objects without first having to implement version control supplements for their own kinds of objects. The proposed architecture is evaluated using a prototype implementation that can be used to track objects in Squeak/Smalltalk with Git. The prototype improves the suboptimal standing of user objects with respect to version control described above and also simplifies some version control tasks for classes and methods as well. It also raises new problems, which are discussed in this report as well.
Enacting business processes in process engines requires the coverage of control flow, resource assignments, and process data. While the first two aspects are well supported in current process engines, data dependencies need to be added and maintained manually by a process engineer. Thus, this task is error-prone and time-consuming. In this report, we address the problem of modeling processes with complex data dependencies, e.g., m:n relationships, and their automatic enactment from process models. First, we extend BPMN data objects with few annotations to allow data dependency handling as well as data instance differentiation. Second, we introduce a pattern-based approach to derive SQL queries from process models utilizing the above mentioned extensions. Therewith, we allow automatic enactment of data-aware BPMN process models. We implemented our approach for the Activiti process engine to show applicability.
Business process automation improves organizations’ efficiency to perform work. In existing business process management systems, process instances run independently from each other. However, synchronizing instances carrying similar characteristics, i.e., sharing the same data, can reduce process execution costs. For example, if an online retailer receives two orders from one customer, there is a chance that they can be packed and shipped together to save shipment costs. In this paper, we use concepts from the database domain and introduce data views to business processes to identify instances which can be synchronized. Based on data views, we introduce the concept of batch regions for a context-aware instance synchronization over a set of connected activities. We also evaluate the concepts introduced in this paper with a case study comparing costs for normal and batch processing.
Design and Implementation of service-oriented architectures imposes a huge number of research questions from the fields of software engineering, system analysis and modeling, adaptability, and application integration. Component orientation and web services are two approaches for design and realization of complex web-based system. Both approaches allow for dynamic application adaptation as well as integration of enterprise application. Commonly used technologies, such as J2EE and .NET, form de facto standards for the realization of complex distributed systems. Evolution of component systems has lead to web services and service-based architectures. This has been manifested in a multitude of industry standards and initiatives such as XML, WSDL UDDI, SOAP, etc. All these achievements lead to a new and promising paradigm in IT systems engineering which proposes to design complex software solutions as collaboration of contractually defined software services. Service-Oriented Systems Engineering represents a symbiosis of best practices in object-orientation, component-based development, distributed computing, and business process management. It provides integration of business and IT concerns. The annual Ph.D. Retreat of the Research School provides each member the opportunity to present his/her current state of their research and to give an outline of a prospective Ph.D. thesis. Due to the interdisciplinary structure of the Research Scholl, this technical report covers a wide range of research topics. These include but are not limited to: Self-Adaptive Service-Oriented Systems, Operating System Support for Service-Oriented Systems, Architecture and Modeling of Service-Oriented Systems, Adaptive Process Management, Services Composition and Workflow Planning, Security Engineering of Service-Based IT Systems, Quantitative Analysis and Optimization of Service-Oriented Systems, Service-Oriented Systems in 3D Computer Graphics sowie Service-Oriented Geoinformatics.
The “HPI Future SOC Lab” is a cooperation of the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (HPI) and industrial partners. Its mission is to enable and promote exchange and interaction between the research community and the industrial partners. The HPI Future SOC Lab provides researchers with free of charge access to a complete infrastructure of state of the art hard- and software. This infrastructure includes components, which might be too expensive for an ordinary research environment, such as servers with up to 64 cores. The offerings address researchers particularly from but not limited to the areas of computer science and business information systems. Main areas of research include cloud computing, parallelization, and In-Memory technologies. This technical report presents results of research projects executed in 2012. Selected projects have presented their results on June 18th and November 26th 2012 at the Future SOC Lab Day events.
