Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has gained considerable popularity for the development of distributed enterprise-wide applications within the software industry. The SOA paradigm promotes the reusability and integrability of software in heterogeneous environments by means of open standards. Most software companies capitalize on SOA by discovering and composing services already accessible over the Internet, whereas other organizations need internal control of applications and develop new services with quality-attribute properties tailored to their particular environment. Therefore, based on architectural and business requirements, developers can elaborate different alternatives within a SOA framework to design their software applications. Each of these alternatives will imply trade-offs among quality attributes, such as performance, dependability and availability, among others. In this context, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can assist developers in dealing with service-oriented design with the positive impact on scalability and management of generic quality attributes. In this paper, we offer a detailed, conceptualized and synthesized analysis of AI research works that have aimed at discovering, composing, or developing services. We also identify open research issues and challenges in the aforementioned research areas. The results of the characterization of 69 contemporary approaches and potential research directions for the areas are also shown. It is concluded that AI has aimed at exploiting the semantic resources and achieving quality-attribute properties so as to produce flexible and adaptive-to-change service discovery, composition, and development.

Abstract Finding software faults is a problematic activity in many systems. Existing approaches usually work close to the system implementation and require developers to perform different code analyses. Although these approaches are effective, the amount of information to be managed by developers is often overwhelming. This problem calls for complementary approaches able to work at higher levels of abstraction than code, helping developers to keep intellectual control over the system when analyzing faults. In this context, we present an expert‐system approach, called FLABot, which assists developers in fault‐localization tasks by reasoning about faults using software architecture models. We have evaluated a prototype of FLABot in two medium‐size case studies, involving novice and non‐novice developers. We compared time consumed, code browsed and faults found by these developers, with and without the support of FLABot, observing interesting effort reductions when applying FLABot. The results and lessons learned have shown that our approach is practical and reduces the efforts for finding individual faults.

ABSTRACT Botnets are an important security problem on the Internet. They continuously evolve their structure, protocols and attacks. This survey analyzes and compares the most important efforts carried out in a network‐based detection area. It accomplishes four tasks: first, the comparison of previous surveys and the proposal of four new dimensions to analyze their classification schemes; second, a new classification and comparison of network‐based botnet detection proposals, which includes the definition of 20 desired properties of every botnet detection paper; third, an extensive comparison between the most representative detection proposals; and fourth, the description of the most important problems and highlights in the area. We conclude that the area has achieved great advances so far, but there are still many open problems. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Information diffusion has been studied between and within biosphere, microblogs, social networks, citation networks and other domains, where the network structure is present. These studies have turned to be useful for acquiring intrinsic knowledge for strategic decision making in related areas, for example, planning online campaigns in case of microblogs and blogosphere. In the context of data-centric Web services, information exchange patterns will reveal practical heuristics for efficient Web services selection and composition. For example, by possible knowledge that there is information flow between Web services of \textit{Financial Analysis Services} and \textit{Enterprise Resource Planning Services}, as outlined by our experimental results, the potential applications, which interact with \textit{Financial Analysis} services, can be adjusted to take advantage of \textit{Enterprise Resource Planning} services as well. In this paper we present a method for analyzing information diffusion between categories of data-centric Web services. The method operates on a Web services network constructed by linking interface descriptions of categorized Web services. The proposed method is evaluated on a case study of global Web services. The results indicate high potential of the proposed model in understanding interactions between categories of Web services.

Discovering services acquires importance as Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) becomes an adopted paradigm. SOC’s most popular materializations, namely Web Services technologies, have different challenges related to service discovery and, in turn, many approaches have been proposed. As these approaches are different, one solution may be better than another according to certain requirements. In consequence, choosing a service discovery system is a hard task. To alleviate this task, this paper proposes eight criteria, based on the requirements for discovering services within common service-oriented environments, allowing the characterization of discovery systems. These criteria cover functional and non-functional aspects of approaches to service discovery. The results of the characterization of 22 contemporary approaches and potential research directions for the area are also shown.

Abstract: Software architectures are very important to capture early design decisions and reason about quality attributes of a system. Unfortunately, there are mismatches between the quality attributes prescribed by the architecture and those realized by its object‐oriented implementation. The mismatches decrease the ability to reason architecturally about the system. Developing an object‐oriented materialization that conforms to the original architecture depends on both the application of the right patterns and the developer's expertise. Since the space of allowed materializations can be really large, tool support for assisting the developer in the exploration of alternative materializations is of great help. In previous research, we developed a prototype for generating quality‐preserving implementations of software architectures, using pre‐compiled knowledge about architectural styles and frameworks. In this paper, we present a more flexible approach, called SAME, which focuses on the architectural connectors as the pillars for the materialization process. The SAME design assistant applies a case‐based reasoning (CBR) metaphor to deal with connector‐related materialization experiences and quality attributes. The CBR engine is able to recall and adapt past experiences to solve new materialization problems; thus SAME can take advantage of developers' knowledge. Preliminary experiments have shown that this approach can improve the exploration of object‐oriented solutions that are still faithful to the architectural prescriptions.

Abstract The benefits of Grids for building massively distributed applications have been broadly acknowledged. However, the high complexity of developing Grid applications compromises the widespread adoption of the paradigm. In a previous paper (Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 2008; 24(2):99–118), we have described JGRIM, a method for easily ‘gridifying’ Java applications, based on non‐invasively injecting Grid functionality into ordinary code through Dependency Injection (DI). DI is similar to the Inversion of Control notion of object‐oriented frameworks and allows external services providing certain functionality to be injected into application components that require these services without affecting the components' implementation. In this paper, we briefly revisit JGRIM and present m‐JGRIM, a novel Java middleware that materializes JGRIM concepts by transforming ordinary applications into entities called Mobile Grid Services, i.e. gridified applications with mobile capabilities that live within a Grid. We also provide an evaluation of the performance of m‐JGRIM. Grid practitioners should find this paper useful in having an assessment of the practical benefits and costs of gridifying applications with the middleware, and a down‐to‐earth description of JGRIM, whose advantages for Grid‐enabling applications from a software engineering perspective have been already evaluated in (Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 2008; 24(2):99–118). Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Software visualization studies techniques and methods for graphically representing different aspects of software. Its main goal is to enhance, simplify and clarify the mental representation a software engineer has of a computer system. During many years, visualization in 2D space has been actively studied, but in the last decade, researchers have begun to explore new 3D representations for visualizing software. In this article, we present an overview of current research in the area, describing several major aspects like: visual representations, interaction issues, evaluation methods and development tools. We also perform a survey of some representative tools to support different tasks, i.e., software maintenance and comprehension, requirements validation and algorithm animation for educational purposes, among others. Finally, we conclude identifying future research directions.

Many advances have been done to allow groups of people to work together and collaborate in the Internet. Collaborative systems are characterized by the way participants interact. In many cases, equal standing members should cooperate in a non-authoritative environment, where no entity or authority is or should be in charge of regulating the group. Therefore, decentralized communication infrastructures have been hailed as promising alternatives. Recently, decentralized infrastructures based on P2P approaches have drawn the attention of the research community because of their benefits in terms of scalability, robustness, availability and potentials for leveraging computational resources distributed across the Internet. In this paper, a scalable peer-to-peer (P2P) communication Infrastructure for groupware applications is presented. It enables a large number of people to join and cooperate in a robust, decentralized and easy deployable way, without requiring high capacity servers or any other special network infrastructure. The communication infrastructure is based on a binary tree as overlay structure, which implements all groupware communication functionality, including membership management and packet forwarding, at application level, making it an inexpensive and fast deployable solution for equal standing members, such as home users with a domestic connection to the Internet. Two applications, one for synchronous groupware and the other for asynchronous collaboration, have been developed to validate the approach. Comparisons with other communication infrastructures in aspects such as end-to-end propagation delay, group latency, throughput, protocol overhead, failure recovery and link stress, show that our approach is a scalable and robust alternative.

Abstract The Grid shows itself as a globally distributed computing environment, in which hardware and software resources are virtualized to transparently provide applications with vast capabilities. Just like the electrical power grid, the Grid aims at offering a powerful yet easy‐to‐use computing infrastructure to which applications can be easily ‘plugged’ and efficiently executed. Unfortunately, it is still very difficult to Grid‐enable applications, since current tools force users to take into account many details when adapting applications to run on the Grid. In this paper, we survey some of the recent efforts in providing tools for easy gridification of applications and propose several taxonomies to identify approaches followed in the materialization of such tools. We conclude this paper by describing common features among the proposed approaches, and by pointing out open issues and future directions in the research and development of gridification methods. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Given the difficulties of conventional object technologies to deal with quality-attribute concerns, software architectures appear as an interesting approach to manage them better. A problem to make this approach feasible is the gap between architectural and object models. Succeeding in bridging these two worlds implies that those design decisions about quality attributes made at the architectural level should be reflected at the object level. Nonetheless, a given architecture usually admits multiple, different materializations. Furthermore, any materialization requires considerable design background and experience from the developer. In this paper, we describe a tool approach, called ArchMatE, to assist developers in the exploration of object-oriented solutions for grounding specific architectural models. An important aspect of the approach is that the materializations are accomplished by means of quality-oriented strategies, so that those concerns prescribed by the original architecture are mostly preserved.

No abstract available.

Summary form only given. Proposes an approach for enhancing aspect-oriented software development considering aspects as first-class design entities. The proposal puts together lines of research coming from different fields, namely: aspect-oriented frameworks, aspect models extending UML models, knowledge-driven framework documentation and agent-based planning. The concept of smart-weaving promotes essentially an early incorporation of aspects in the development cycle, so that designers are able to specify their designs by means of aspect models, reuse parts of these models, and also provide different strategies to map generic aspect structures to specific implementations. With this purpose, we have built an experimental environment called Smartweaver aiming to support this process. The kind of assistance provided by the tool relies on the Smartbooks method, a method extending traditional techniques for framework documentation. Smartbooks includes a special planning agent that is able to derive the sequence of activities that should be executed to implement a given functionality from a target framework.

Abstract In this article, we present an approach to architecture‐driven design of object‐oriented frameworks based on the notion of object‐oriented materialization of architectural styles. This approach leads us to the development of the proto‐framework concept, which is a new denomination for an object‐oriented framework that provides the essential basis to build other frameworks that adopt an underlying architectural design derived from non‐object‐oriented styles. In this context, we describe the approach to framework design, the design of a particular proto‐framework called Bubble, and a real example of its application to the design of an enterprise framework. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Enforcing framework adaptability is one of the key points in the process of building an object-oriented application framework. When it comes to simulation, some adaptation mechanisms to configure components on-the-fly are usually required in order to produce quality software artifacts and alleviate development effort. The paper reports on an experience using a simulation multi-agent framework, initially conceived to be used in fluid flow problems. The framework architecture demonstrated during its evolution a great potential regarding to flexibility and modularity, tackling a wide range of other problems ranging from a network protocol simulation to a soccer simulation.

In this work we present a tool for assisting object-oriented framework instantiation based on Intelligent Agent technology. Differently from other approaches, the user is able to select the functionality needed for the new application, and based on this selection an agent elaborates a sequence of programming activities that should be carried out in order to implement it. In addition, the agent guides the execution of the activities according to the framework design. To enable this behavior, the framework need to be documented following the SmartBooks method, which extends traditional framework documentation with instantiation rules. In this paper we present an example of an instantiation environment built based on these ideas and the main characteristics of the SmartBooks method for documenting frameworks through instantiation knowledge rules.

In this work, we present an approach for documenting object-oriented application frameworks and use the documentation to guide the framework instantiation process. Our approach is based on a shift from a framework-centered to a functionality-centered documentation, through which a tool can guide the instantiation process according to the functionality required for the new application. The fundamental idea of our work is the combination of the concept of user-tasks modeling and least commitment planning methods to guide the instantiation process. Based on these techniques, the tool is able to present the different high level activities that can be carried out when creating a new application from a framework to the developer, taking as a basis the documentation provided by the designer through instantiation rules.

The construction of information visualization systems is a difficult task. However, there is little research into the provision of software architectures for visualization systems to reduce this difficulty. Particularly, systems that provide a reusable support for the automatic management of the different levels of abstraction in which complex data can be observed cannot be found in current visualization systems. Telescope, an object-oriented architecture for visualization systems is presented. Its main goal is to provide a customizable infrastructure to develop visualization systems allowing the automatic management of the different levels of abstraction in which the visualized information can be observed. Telescope is based on the concept of abstractor objects which provides the generic behavior to support visualizations with semantic zoom capabilities controlled externally through abstraction scales. CityVis, a visualization system for city data, developed using the Telescope architecture, is also described.