Juan Manuel Rodriguez

Improving Web Service descriptions for effective service discovery

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a new paradigm that replaces the traditional way to develop distributed software with a combination of discovery, engagement and reuse of third-party services. Web Service technologies are currently the most adopted alternative for implementing the SOC paradigm. However, Web Service discovery presents many challenges that, in the end, hinder service reuse. This paper reports frequent practices present in a body of public services that attempt to prevent the discovery of any service. In addition, we have studied how to solve the discoverability problems that these bad practices cause. Accordingly, this paper presents a novel catalog of eight Web Service discoverability anti-patterns. We conducted a comparative analysis of the retrieval effectiveness of three discovery systems by using the original body of Web Services versus their corrected version. This experiment shows that the removal of the identified anti-patterns eases the discovery process by allowing the employed discovery systems to rank more relevant services before non-relevant ones, with the same queries. Moreover, we conducted a survey to collect the opinions from 26 individuals about whether the improved descriptions are more intelligible than the original ones. This experiment provides more evidence of the importance of correcting the observed problems.

Introducing mobile devices into Grid systems: a survey

Mobile device capabilities have been steadily increasing in the past years. Therefore, mobile Grids potential benefits have encouraged research on this topic. Researchers have identified several issues, such as energy consumption and limited resources, that steam from using mobile devices because they are small computers that run on battery and can move outside of the wireless coverage area. This paper analyses these issues discusses proposed solutions to them in the different Grid abstraction levels from Grid fabric layer to Grid user application layer. Finally, we propose a taxonomy that considers the use of mobile devices and discuss future research opportunities.

Automatically Detecting Opportunities for Web Service Descriptions Improvement

Mostly e-business and e-applications rely on the Service Oriented Computing paradigm and its most popular implementation, namely Web Services. When properly implemented and described, Web Services can be dynamically discovered and reused using Internet technologies, pushing interoperability to unprecedented levels. However, poorly described Web Services are rather difficult to be discovered, understood, and reused. This paper presents heuristics for automatically detecting common pitfalls that should be avoided when creating Web Service descriptions. Experimental results with ca. 400 real-world Web Services, empirically show the feasibility of the proposed heuristics.

Best practices for describing, consuming, and discovering web services: a comprehensive toolset

The service‐oriented computing (SOC) paradigm has recently gained a lot of attention in the software industry because SOC represents a novel and a fresh way of architecting distributed applications. SOC is usually materialized via web services, which allows developers to structure applications exposing a clear, public interface to their capabilities. Although conceptually and technologically mature, SOC still lacks adequate development support from a methodological point of view. In this paper, we present the EasySOC project, a set of guidelines to simplify the development of service‐oriented applications and services. EasySOC is a synthesized catalog of best SOC development practices that arise as a result of several years of research in fundamental Services Computing topics, that is, Web Service Description Language‐based technical specification, Web Service discovery, and Web Service outsourcing. In addition, we describe a materialization of the guidelines for the Java language, which has been implemented as a plug‐in for the Eclipse IDE. We believe that both the practical nature of the guidelines and the availability of this software that enforces them may help software practitioners to rapidly exploit our ideas for building real SOC applications. Copyright

A tool to improve code-first Web services discoverability through text mining techniques

Service‐oriented development is challenging mainly because Web service developers tend to disregard the importance of the exposed service APIs, which are specified using Web Service Description Language (WSDL) documents. Methodologically, WSDL documents can be either manually generated or inferred from service implementations using WSDL generation tools. The latter option, called code first, is the most used approach in the industry. However, it is known that there are some bad practices in service implementations or defects in WSDL generation tools that may cause WSDL documents to present WSDL anti‐patterns, which in turn compromise the chances of documents of being discovered and understood. In this paper, we present a software tool that assists developers in obtaining WSDL documents with as few WSDL anti‐patterns as possible. The tool combines text mining and meta‐programming techniques to process service implementations and is developed as an Eclipse plug‐in. An evaluation of the tool by using a data‐set of real service implementations in terms of anti‐pattern avoidance accuracy and discovery performance by using classical Information Retrieval metrics—Precision‐at‐n, Recall and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain—is also reported.Copyright

Bottom-up and top-down COBOL system migration to Web Services: An experience report

Moving from mainframe systems to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) using Web services is an attractive but daunting task. The bottom-up or direct-migration approach enables the effective modernization of legacy systems to Web services. Conversely, bringing migration into fruition with the top-down or indirect-migration approach is more difficult, but it achieves better migration results. Employing both approaches on the same large enterprise system is uncommon, which leaves no room for comparison. This article describes the migration processes, costs, and outcomes of applying both approaches on a real Cobol system.

Best Practices for Describing, Consuming, and Discovering Web Services: A Comprehensive Toolset [Thomson ISI, IF JCR2012=1.008]

The service‐oriented computing (SOC) paradigm has recently gained a lot of attention in the software industry because SOC represents a novel and a fresh way of architecting distributed applications. SOC is usually materialized via web services, which allows developers to structure applications exposing a clear, public interface to their capabilities. Although conceptually and technologically mature, SOC still lacks adequate development support from a methodological point of view. In this paper, we present the EasySOC project, a set of guidelines to simplify the development of service‐oriented applications and services. EasySOC is a synthesized catalog of best SOC development practices that arise as a result of several years of research in fundamental Services Computing topics, that is, Web Service Description Language‐based technical specification, Web Service discovery, and Web Service outsourcing. In addition, we describe a materialization of the guidelines for the Java language, which has been implemented as a plug‐in for the Eclipse IDE. We believe that both the practical nature of the guidelines and the availability of this software that enforces them may help software practitioners to rapidly exploit our ideas for building real SOC applications. Copyright

Bottom-Up and Top-Down Cobol System Migration to Web Services

Moving from mainframe systems to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) using Web services is an attractive but daunting task. The bottom-up or direct-migration approach enables the effective modernization of legacy systems to Web services. Conversely, bringing migration into fruition with the top-down or indirect-migration approach is more difficult, but it achieves better migration results. Employing both approaches on the same large enterprise system is uncommon, which leaves no room for comparison. This article describes the migration processes, costs, and outcomes of applying both approaches on a real Cobol system.

Are smartphones really useful for scientific computing

Smartphones are a new kind of mobile devices that allow users to take their office anywhere and anytime with them. The number of smartphones is rapidly growing. Most of the time their capabilities are underused, therefore several authors have studied how to exploit smartphones for assisting scientific computing. Yet, as far as we know, there is no study aimed at determining whether smartphones can do a significant contribution to this area as resource providers. This paper shows that smartphones are not that slow when compared to standard mobile devices, such as notebooks. Furthermore, a notebook running on battery only performed 8 times more work than a low-end smartphone before their batteries run out. However, the low-end smartphone is 145 times slower than the notebook, and the smartphone battery has less capacity than the notebook battery. Since smartphones can execute large amount of work running on battery, we think that smartphones can have a major role in building the next-generation HPC infrastructures.

The EasySOC Project: A Rich Catalog of Best Practices for Developing Web Service Applications

The Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm has gained a lot of attention in the software industry since represents a novel way of architecting distributed applications. SOC is mostly materialized via Web Services, which allows developers to structure applications as building blocks exposing a clear, public interface to their capabilities. Although conceptually and technologically mature, SOC still lacks adequate development support from a methodological point of view. We present the Easy SOC project, a catalog of guidelines to build service-oriented applications and services. This catalog synthesizes best SOC development practices that arise as a result of several years of research in fundamental SOC-related topics, namely WSDL-based technical specification, Web Service discovery and Web Service outsourcing. In addition, we describe a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE that has been implemented to simplify the utilization of the guidelines. We believe that both the practical nature of the guidelines, the empirical evidence that supports them, and the availability of IDE support that enforces them will help software practitioners to rapidly exploit our ideas for building real SOC applications.