Alfonso García de Prado

Improving device-aware Web services and their mobile clients through an aspect-oriented, model-driven approach

Context: Mobile devices have become an essential element in our daily lives, even for connecting to the Internet. Consequently, Web services have become extremely important when offering services through the Internet. However, current Web services are very inflexible as regards their invocation from different types of device, especially if we consider the need for them to be adaptable when being invoked from mobile devices. Objective: In this paper, we provide an approach for the creation of flexible Web services which can be invoked transparently from different device types and which return subsequent responses, as well as providing the clients adaptation as a result of the particular device characteristics and end-user preferences in a completely decoupled way. Method: Aspect-Oriented Programming and model-driven development have been used to reduce both the impact of service and client code adaptation for multiple devices as well as to facilitate the developers task. Results: A model-driven methodology can be followed from system models to code, providing the Web service developer with the option of marking which services should be adapted to mobile devices in the UML models, and obtaining the decoupled adaptation code automatically from the models. Conclusion: We can conclude that the approach presented in this paper provides us with the possibility of following the development of mobile-aware Web services in an integrated platform, benefiting from the use of aspect-oriented techniques not only for maintaining device-related code completely decoupled from the main functionality one, but also allowing a modularized non-intrusive adaptation of mobile clients to the specific device characteristics as well as to final user preferences.

Mobile-Aware Web Services

The increasing demand for services for mobile customers has resulted in the need to develop Web services clients that could be used from mobile devices as well as from PCs, which to date has been the main focus for developers. In this paper we propose an aspect-oriented approach which allows services to be invoked ubiquitously from different type of devices without modifying the structure and encapsulation of the offered service. The paper will show how this can be provided both at compile and at runtime.

Towards Adapting Web Services for Multiple Devices

Web Services have become extremely important when offering services through the Internet. However, current Web Services are very inflexible as regards their invocation from different types of device, especially when taking into account their adaptation when being invoked from a mobile device. In this paper, we propose several alternatives for the creation of flexible Web services which can be invoked from different types of device. Besides, in order to reduce the impact of service adaption Aspect-Oriented Programming has been used in all proposals’ implementation.

CARED-SOA: A Context-Aware Event-Driven Service-Oriented Architecture

Currently, context awareness has become essential in software applications and services owing to the high demand by users, especially for mobile computing applications. This need to provide context awareness requires a software infrastructure not only to receive context information but also to make use of it so that it provides advantageous services that may be customized according to user needs. In this paper, we provide an event-driven service-oriented architecture supported by an enterprise service bus, which will facilitate the incorporation of Internet of Things data and provide real-time context-aware services. The result, which has been validated through a real-world case study, is a scalable context-aware architecture which can be applied in a wide spectrum of domains.

Web Service Adaptation: A Unified Approach versus Multiple Methodologies for Different Scenarios

Web services provide a successful way to communicate distributed applications, in a platform- independent and loosely coupled manner. Even though there are examples of good practice for the design, development and management of Web services, there are scopes in which Web service adaptation is required, such as context, device and customer adaptation. Current proposals usually focus on client-side adaptation; however, we consider service-side adaptation more appropriate so that we can avoid larger process and memory loads for the client implementation. In this paper we propose such adaptation on the service-side, always maintaining a loosely coupled service implementation as well as keeping its main functionality structure through an aspect-oriented implementation; besides, we facilitate the work of the developer through a model-driven procedure. Therefore, a loosely coupled automatically generated code is provided to facilitate service adaptation.

MoDAS: Methodology and Tool for Model-Driven Adaptable Services

Context-aware software for mobile and desktop users is an emerging field for software development. Due to the increasing market, most of the industry and scientific proposals in this field focus on solving context-aware adaptation issues for browser-based applications only. However, other applications, such as web services, also require context adaptation. This paper aims at providing a solution for context-aware web services and their desktop or mobile clients. In this regard, we provide a model-driven methodology for developing adaptable web services: from the initial system model, we will identify where context awareness is required and afterwards the main system skeleton code along with the context adaptation code will be automatically generated. Using this methodology, and also the provided tool, developers will be able to easily create well structured and modularized context-adaptable services, where final service code will be completely separate from context-related functionalities through an aspect-oriented implementation.

FOSTERING LEARNING THROUGH MEDIA GAMES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

One of the key challenges of university teaching is encouraging students to revise the learnt matters along the academic semester, rather than waiting for the final exam to study it. Occasionally, partial exams are included in the middle of the semester, becoming the same problem: students study only for the exam that is not currently at the end of the semester, but they do not revisit the contents any more. In this paper, we relate an experience developed in several subjects of the Computer Science and Engineering Degree at the University of Cádiz, Spain. In such subjects, we introduced a couple of well-known media game shows along the semester. We encouraged students to study during the week before in order to compete (in teams of around five people) in the game. The game questions focused on the subject contents. The results were that the students (1) studied before the game (even though there were no extra mark for reward), (2) collaborated in their team to be the winners, (3) revisited the topics during the game, and (4) enjoyed the activity developed. As a result, the learning process was reinforced and improved with a motivating game-based activity.