Paula Montoto

A Component-Based Approach for Engineering Enterprise Mashups

Mashup applications combine pieces of functionality from several existing, heterogeneous sources to provide new integrated functionality. This paper presents the design of an enterprise-oriented mashup tool that fully supports the construction of mashup applications. Our tool provides generic, reusable components to engineer mashup applications. It includes components for accessing heterogeneous sources, a component to combine data from different sources and components for building the graphical interface. The user builds graphically the mashup application by selecting, customizing, and interconnecting components. Unlike other proposals we: (1) use the Data Federation/Mediation pattern (instead of Pipes and Filters pattern) to express the data combination logic, (2) follow the RESTful architectural style to improve component reusability, and (3) reuse Java standard portal technology to implement the graphical interface of the mashup application.

The denodo data integration platform

The world today is characterised by the proliferation of information sources available through media such as the WWW, databases, semi-structured files (e.g. XML documents), etc. Nevertheless, this information is usually scattered, heterogeneous and weakly structured, so it is difficult to process it automatically. DENODO Corporation has developed a mediator system for the construction of semi-structured and structured data integration applications. This system has already been used in the construction of several applications on the Internet and in corporate environments, which are currently deployed at several important Internet audience sites and large sized business corporations. In this extended abstract, we present an overview of the system and we put forward some conclusions arising from our experience in building real-world data integration applications, focusing in some challenges we believe require more attention from the research community.

Automating Navigation Sequences in AJAX Websites

Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration, automated testing of web applications or technology and business watch. One crucial part in web automation applications is to allow easily generating and reproducing navigation sequences. Previous proposals in the literature assumed a navigation model today turned obsolete by the new breed of AJAX-based websites. Although some open-source and commercial tools have also addressed the problem, they show significant limitations either in usability or their ability to deal with complex websites. In this paper, we propose a set of new techniques to deal with this problem. Our main contributions are a new method for recording navigation sequences supporting a wider range of events, and a novel method to detect when the effects caused by a user action have finished. We have evaluated our approach with more than 100 web applications, obtaining very good results.

Automated browsing in AJAX websites

Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration, automated testing of web applications or technology and business watch. One crucial part in web automation applications is for them to easily generate and reproduce navigation sequences. This problem is specially complicated in the case of the new breed of AJAX-based websites. Although recently some tools have also addressed the problem, they show some limitations either in usability or their ability to deal with complex websites. In this paper, we propose a set of new techniques to build an automatic web navigation system able to deal with these complexities. Our main contributions are: a new method for recording navigation sequences able to scale to a wider range of events, an algorithm to identify in a change-resilient manner the target element of a user action, and a novel method to detect when the effects caused by a user action (including the effects of scripting code and AJAX requests) have finished. In addition, we have also tested our approach with a high number of real web sources and have compared it with other relevant web automation tools obtaining very good results.

Efficient execution of web navigation sequences

Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration and automated testing of web applications. Most current systems build the automatic web navigation component by using the APIs of conventional browsers. While this approach has its advantages, it suffers performance problems for intensive web automation tasks which require real time responses and/or a high degree of parallelism. In this paper, we outline a set of techniques to build a web navigation component able to efficiently execute web navigation sequences. These techniques detect what elements and scripts of the pages accessed during the navigation sequence are needed for the correct execution of the sequence (and, therefore, must be loaded and executed), and what parts of the pages can be discarded. The tests executed with real web sources show that the optimized navigation sequences run significantly faster and consume significantly less resources.

Mediator systems in E-commerce applications

The world today is characterised by the proliferation of information sources available through media such as the WWW, databases, semi-structured files, etc. But, very often, this information is scattered, heterogeneous and weakly structured (semi-structured data). E-commerce is, by nature, one field in which this phenomena is specially strong. This paper overviews a mediator system for the construction of structured and semi-structured data integration applications. This system has been used in the construction of various applications on the Internet and in corporate environments, which are being used in real operational environments. Some conclusions arising from the experience gained from the use of such applications are also put forward.

Web Navigation Sequences Automation in Modern Websites

Most todays web sources are designed to be used by humans, but they do not provide suitable interfaces for software programs. That is why a growing interest has arisen in so-called web automation applications that are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration, automated testing of web applications or technology and business watch. Previous proposals assume models for generating and reproducing navigation sequences that are not able to correctly deal with new websites using technologies such as AJAX: on one hand existing systems only allow recording simple navigation actions and, on the other hand, they are unable to detect the end of the effects caused by an user action. In this paper, we propose a set of new techniques to record and execute web navigation sequences able to deal with all the complexity existing in AJAX-based web sites. We also present an exhaustive evaluation of the proposed techniques that shows very promising results.

Towards Semi-automatic Construction of Data Mashups

Mashup applications combine pieces of functionality from several existing web data sources to provide new integrated functionality. In this work-in-progress paper, we outline a new method for creating data mashups that suggests to users new relevant data sources and the most suitable ways of combining them. This makes the data mashup process much easier for non-technical users.

Parallel JavaScript Execution in Web Navigation Sequences

Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration and automated testing of web applications. Most current systems build the automatic web navigation component by using the APIs of conventional browsers. This approach suffers performance problems for intensive web automation tasks which require real time responses. Other systems use the approach of creating custom browsers specially designed for web automation. Those browsers can develop some improvements based in the peculiarities of the web automation tasks. In this paper, we present a novel optimization technique that allows the parallel execution of the JavaScript while the navigation component loads the web page. This technique is based in the analysis of the interactions between the scripts during the first loading of the web page, generating some useful information that will be saved and used in the next executions. The tests executed with real web sources show that the scripts contained in the HTML documents can be evaluated concurrently and the navigation component loads the web pages faster when the scripts are executed in parallel.

A Custom Browser Architecture to Execute Web Navigation Sequences

Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration and automated testing of web applications. Most current systems build the automatic web navigation component by using the APIs of conventional browsers. This approach suffers performance problems for intensive web automation tasks which require real time responses and/or a high degree of parallelism. Other systems use the approach of creating custom browsers to avoid some of the tasks of conventional browsers, but they work like them, when building the internal representation of the web pages. In this paper, we present a complete architecture for a custom browser able to efficiently execute web navigation sequences. The proposed architecture supports some novel automatic optimization techniques that can be applied when loading and building the internal representation of the pages. The tests performed using real web sources show that the reference implementation of the proposed architecture runs significantly faster than other navigation components.