In many organizations, there are numerous business processes that involve sensitive tasks that may encourage corruption. Conflict of interest policies are defined in an organization to deter corruption before it can happen. Existing research generally focuses on separation of duties, yet lacks attention for the underpinning conflicts of interest. Moreover, separation of duty is only one particular kind of conflicts of interest. Other kinds do exist and must be resolved as well.

Writing parallel software effectively for embedded systems is not an easy task. We believe a new approach is needed to maximize the performance speed-up. Therefore we propose a layered top-down model for parallel embedded software, based on Our Pattern Language for High-Performance Computing. Several case studies were developed to demonstrate the strength of the model. First, a Fast Fourier Transformation algorithm was parallelized using the top-down model. A speed-up was achieved close to the theoretical maximum. Next, a telecommunication system was migrated from a naive symmetric multiprocessing setup to an asymmetric multiprocessing set-up. Finally, an algorithm that searches for sequences in a list of arcs and lines was implemented in two different ways. The strengths and weaknesses of both parallel implementations are explained.

Web service applications integrate explicit client-service interactions with notification-style programming. Such event-driven interactions are often called implicit invocations because the notification message is not in itself a business interaction. Rather, it is used to implicitly trigger such interactions as a means for reacting to events. Web Services specifications such as WS-Notification have been developed in order to standardize the way notifications are sent, but they only support the most basic form of event notification. In this paper, we discuss the architecture and the implementation of an expressive notification broker based on extension mechanisms presented by the WS-Notification specification. This broker improves the standard WSN broker in three ways. First, it supports event correlation and hence allows for composite event detection. Second, it integrates events and reactions into Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules that can be registered directly at the broker. Third, it introduces event-driven lifecycle management for ECA rules, thus allowing to dynamically adapt these ECA rules to changing situations.

Object-oriented programming languages are losing pace with the rapidly evolving Web Services paradigm. They are unable to deal with the distributed, volatile nature of web services, and they lack expressive language constructs for complex web service interactions. In this paper, we present ServiceJ, a Java extension with integrated support for web service programming. By extending the type system with type qualifiers, ServiceJ realizes important objectives from both paradigms. On one hand, ServiceJ resembles Java by promoting reuse and abstraction, and by supporting type- safe web service invocations. On the other hand, ServiceJ supports late web service binding, Quality of Service negotiation, and transparent web service failover. We provide an in-depth discussion of our type system extension, formally prove its type soundness, and compare our language extension with related object-oriented and service-oriented programming languages.

Ever since their invention 30 years ago, checked exceptions have been a point of much discussion. On the one hand, they increase the robustness of software by preventing the manifestation of unanticipated checked exceptions at run-time. On the other hand, they decrease the adaptability of software because they must be propagated explicitly, and must often be handled even if they cannot be signalled.We show that the problems with checked exceptions are caused by a lack of expressiveness of the exceptional return type of a method, which currently dictates a copy & paste style. We add the required expressiveness by introducing anchored exception declarations, which allow the exceptional behavior of a method to be declared relative to that of others. We present the formal semantics of anchored exception declarations, along with the necessary rules for ensuring compile-time safety, and give a proof of soundness. We show that anchored exception declarations do not violate the principle of information hiding when used properly, and provide a guideline for when to use them.We have implemented anchored exception declarations in Cappuccino, which is an extension to the ClassicJava programming language.

In the object-oriented paradigm, as complexity rises, the cost of developing and maintaining software systems grows exponentially. This complexity emerges from the continuous evolution of software systems to cope with changing requirements. This crucial problem can be dealt with by performing an active transformation of the elements (i.e. classes and relations) of the conceptual model to produce an optimum design model. We show transformations for a simple conceptual model consisting of three inter-related classes. Each of these transformations satisfies particular software quality factor(s), from which the software engineer can choose the one that matches the intended non-functional requirements. The added value of this approach is that less manual optimization is required and high maintenance is achieved.

The generation scheme discussed, produces interactive transducers in the form of Ada programs, with an underlying parser that is of type ELL(1). The emphasis is on error recovery in interactive parsers. A generation scheme is proposed containing powerful error-recovery generation capabilities. The interaction between syntactic and semantic error recovery is also discussed. The generation scheme has been implemented as part of the MIRA transducer writing system. With MIRA, a number of industrial case studies have been worked out, from which considerable feedback has been obtained to test and improve the adopted error-recovery strategy. One of the case studies worked out with MIRA consists of the design and implementation of an interactive software package called ABACUS. A subset called MINI-ABACUS is used as an illustration of the error-recovery principles discussed throughout this work.>