Web application frameworks are a proven means to accelerate the development of interactive web applications. However, implementing collaborative real-time applications like Google Docs requires specific concurrency control services (i.e. document synchronization and conflict resolution) that are not included in prevalent general-purpose frameworks like jQuery or Knockout. Hence, developers have to get familiar with specific collaboration frameworks (e.g. ShareJS) which substantially increases the development effort. To ease the development of collaborative web applications, we propose a set of source code annotations representing a lightweight mechanism to introduce concurrency control services into mature web frameworks. Those annotations are interpreted at runtime by a dedicated collaboration engine to sync documents and resolve conflicts. We enhanced the general-purpose framework Knockout with a collaboration engine and conducted a developer study comparing our approach to a traditional concurrency control library. The evaluation results show that the effort to incorporate collaboration capabilities into a web application can be reduced by up to 40 percent using the annotation-based solution.

In the light of the Web 2.0 movement, web-based collaboration tools such as Google Docs have become mainstream and in the meantime serve millions of users. Apart from established collaborative web applications, numerous web editors lack multi-user support even though they are suitable for collaborative work. Enhancing these single-user editors with shared editing capabilities is a costly endeavor since the implementation of a collaboration infrastructure (accommodating conflict resolution, document synchronization, etc.) is required. In this paper, we present a generic transformation approach capable of converting single-user web editors into multi-user editors. Since our approach only requires the configuration of a generic collaboration infrastructure (GCI), the effort to inject shared editing support is significantly reduced in contrast to conventional implementation approaches neglecting reuse. We also report on experimental results of a user study showing that converted editors meet user requirements with respect to software and collaboration qualities. Moreover, we define the characteristics that editors must adhere to in order to leverage the GCI.

In order to access large information pools efficiently data has to be structured and categorized. Recently, applying ontologies to formalize information has become an established approach. In particular, ontology-based search and navigation are promising solutions which are capable to significantly improve state of the art systems (e.g. full-text search engines). However, the ontology roll-out and maintenance are costly tasks. Therefore, we propose a documentation generation platform that automatically derives content and incorporates generated content into an existing ontology. The demanding task of classifying content as concept instances, setting data type and object properties is accomplished by the documentation generation platform. Eventually, our approach results in a semantically enriched content base. Note that no manual effort is required to establish links between content objects and the ontology.

The evolution of service-oriented architectures towards digital ecosystems comprehends a number of challenges. According to Papazoglou et al., one challenge is to develop services in a dynamic environment with high uncertainties, and in collaboration with other companies. The Integrated Service Engineering (ISE) Workbench is a step in this direction in that it supports a model-driven approach and different stakeholders. This paper briefly introduces the ISE Framework, presents the ISE Workbench and its functionality, and proposes a demonstration of a conducted case study in the IT outsourcing domain.