The Department of Computer Science at Hochschule Hannover, Germany, offers students an intriguing practical project that allows them to gain experience in a simulated and protected working environment. This environment provides students with the opportunity to assume responsibilities and exercise autonomy. The project, entitled "StudyTalk", requires students to develop and manage a communication and social networking software in a simulated business environment.

This article looks at a proposed list of generalized requirements for a unified modelling of event processing networks (EPNs) and its application to Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics. It enhances our previous work in this area, in which we recently analyzed Apache Storm and earlier also the EPiA model, the BEMN model, and the RuleCore model. Our proposed EPN requirements look at both: The logical model of EPNs and the concrete technical implementation of them. Therefore, our article provides requirements for EPN models based on attributes derived from event processing in general as well as existing models. Moreover, as its core contribution, our article applies those requirements by an in depth analysis of Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics as a concrete implementation foundation of an EPN model.

REST is an architectural style, which has been around for quite some time and many web services claim to be RESTful, thus making REST a major buzzword in web applications. But are those web services really RESTful? This paper explains Richardson Maturity Model. Based on this model, an analysis of ten APIs is performed and their maturity levels are determined.

This poster presents our experiences in offering 10 years of CS/SE capstone projects in the distributed systems area. Based on a presentation of typical example projects over time we draw interesting conclusions. Our observations over this time span address suitable project subjects, development methodology as well as student motivation in projects and how to raise it. We will show that certain aspects have not changed much over time such as: system integration and its effort is always larger than expected. Similarly, using even a well-established enterprise open source technology usually requires more work than estimated upfront. Also, better students tend to prefer more challenging projects. Other aspects have improved making use of recent findings in research and technological development such as using agile development methodology or novel communication means. Also, we demonstrate that good students projects can contribute to research publications and that an international setting for capstone projects is both raising motivation for students as well as increasing organizational challenges. Overall we found that company sponsored projects generally increase result quality as the "real world touch" seems to be appealing.

Our work is motivated primarily by the lack of standardization in the area of Event Processing Network (EPN) models. We identify general requirements for such models. These requirements encompass the possibility to describe events in the real world, to establish temporal and causal relationships among the events, to aggregate the events, to organize the events into a hierarchy, to categorize the events into simple or complex, to create an EPN model in an easy and simple way and to use that model ad hoc. As the major contribution, this paper applies the identified requirements to the RuleCore model.

Nowadays, REST is the most dominant architectural style of choice at least for newly created web services. So called RESTfulness is thus really a catchword for web application, which aim to expose parts of their functionality as RESTful web services. But are those web services RESTful indeed? This paper examines the RESTfulness of ten popular RESTful APIs (including Twitter and PayPal). For this examination, the paper defines REST, its characteristics as well as its pros and cons. Furthermore, Richardson's Maturity Model is shown and utilized to analyse those selected APIs regarding their RESTfulness. As an example, a simple, RESTful web service is provided as well.

The growing market of electric vehicles will lead to new scenarios for handling mobile transmitted data quickly. Electric vehicles have to be recharged frequently with electric power. This could be done at home or at public charging points. Depending of the actual location of the vehicle, the driver will look for unoccupied charging points in the near environment and can ask possible charging point information services for unoccupied charging points. Such services should be able to handle and coordinate the requests quickly, even if a large amount of vehicles will ask for unoccupied charging points. The general problem for such services is the exponentially growing demand of calculation power for coordinating a larger amount of vehicles. Therefore, a generic and expandable model is required to handle the data of the vehicles quickly, while the vehicles are driving.

This paper compares the efficiency of two implementations of the PageRank algorithm, one using Hadoop's MapReduce and the other Giraph's Pregel. The implementations are evaluated against CPU usage, CPU I/O wait time, memory usage, and execution time. The result of the evaluation is that Giraph outperforms Hadoop.

Summary form only given. Today's distributed information systems often are collections of existing information sources and as such heterogeneous. Technical integration of heterogeneous sources is supported by CORBA. However, CORBA provides very general support and does not take source specific semantics into account. This also applies to CORBA's Event Service. Our objective is to enhance CORBA by mechanisms that allow to add application semantics. Our key idea is to provide a flexible configurable event monitoring service, which accepts heterogeneity, for a CORBA environment. Configurable means that we are able to generate code templates at compile time and to provide dynamic parametrization of parts of the service. Event passing semantics follow those developed for active database Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules.

Many application areas require the integration of heterogeneous information sources into a coherent distributed information system. With such systems, users frequently need not only be able to access information, but they also have to be notified automatically when new information that is relevant to their work becomes available. For example, an our environmental systems project, a civil servant needs to be informed when a measured air quality parameter exceeds a certain threshhold. Detection of such a critical situation requires subsequent monitoring of several data sources (e.g., a database recording measurement values and a database with limit values). The paper presents an approach for such situation monitoring which is based on CORBA, for the technical integration of heterogeneous systems and on active DBMS-style ECA-rules. In particular, it discusses how ECA-rules can be adopted in a CORBA environment, and describes a CORBA-based system for situation monitoring. The major implementation issues addressed are event detection within autonomous component systems and detection of complex distributed situations.