Vol.10 No.1 March 15, 2011

Research Articles: 

Using Traceability Links and Higher Order Transformations for Easing Regression Testing of Web Applications (pp001-020)
        Piero Fraternali and Massimo Tisi
For Model-Driven Engineering to become widely accepted by developers, it is necessary that its principles and techniques be applied not only to the generation of code from Platform Independent Models (PIMs), but more generally to all the phases of the software life-cycle. This paper focuses on the use of PIMs to support automation in the regression testing phase of a system; the proposed framework lets developers record and replay testing sessions and investigate testing failures at the level of their PIMs; this is made possible by traceability links automatically weaved into the generated code, whereby developers can follow application execution at the model level. Such traceability links are created by a modified version of the code generation transformation, automatically produced by means of a Higher-Order Transformation (HOT). A HOT is a transformation that takes as input a transformation (the original code generator) and creates another transformation (the code generator capable of producing traceability links). The HOT weaves into the code generator additional rules producing traceability clues that help developers link any error to the model features likely to cause it. This approach is particularly helpful in the Web context, where code generation transformations must follow changes in the technology and presentation styles. Using HOTs ensures the automatic evolution of the transformation for traceability links when the code generation transformation changes.

Offline Web Browsing for Mobile Devices (pp021-047)
        Yung-Wei Kao, Tung-Heng Chow, and Shyan-Ming Yuan
Based on the advancements of mobile device, mobile platform, and wireless network technology, browsing Web pages on mobile devices have become more popular. However, with its difference from the Web browsing behaviour on desktop, mobile Web browsing suffers from more environmental challenges. Traditionally, Web pages can only be viewed with stable telecom or wireless network connection. In recent years, Google Gears has been proposed to enable the offline Web browsing on mobile devices. However, the Google Gears mechanism can only be used with the server-side library supported by Web Servers. The authors proposed a Web content middleware with personalized interest list to support offline Web browsing on mobile devices, even though the selected Web servers do not support the server-side Google Gears mechanism. Finally, we compare other offline Web browsing solutions with ours and evaluate the offlineable rate of our framework.

A Novel Multi-Aspect Consitency Measurement for Ontologies (pp048-069)
        Zhao Lu, Zoltan Miklos, Liang He, Songmei Cai, and Junzhong Gu
Web developers have started to integrate semantic information to their systems increasingly often. The seman-tic metadata embedded with the resources is typically linked to ontologies or taxonomies. Meta informa-tion can bring a number of advantages for users. However, the ontologies might contain some errors or could be partially inconsistent. Therefore it is important to evaluate the quality of ontologies at various levels. Existing evaluation methods either investigate whether the ontologies are "fit for purpose", or focus on evaluating ontology consistencies from a single aspect. In this study, we focus on ontology consis-tency evaluation methods, which consider lexical, taxonomic and syntactic aspects at the same time. We propose new measures, which capture several essential aspects simultaneously. We demon-strate the effectiveness of the new measure through a case study and an extensive set of experiments.

State-of-the Art and trends in the Systematic Development of Rich Internet Applications (pp070-086)
        Giovanni Toffetti, Sara Comai, Juan C. Preciado, and Marino Linaje
Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are widely adopted Web applications that add richer interaction, presentation, and client-side computation capabilities of desktop applications to the Web. However, the evolution from Web applications towards RIAs comes at the cost of increased complexity in their development. For this reason, a wide variety of tools and technologies have been proposed in order to streamline their development effort. This paper investigates the current state of the art of the RIA development approaches. The review shows that the current industrial development practice lacks a comprehensive approach to RIA development, supporting all the development steps from the design to implementation, test and maintenance, and helping identifying correct design choices. This is in part due to the severe fragmentation of current RIA technologies that prevents the adoption of a commonly recognized set of best practices resulting in ad-hoc development processes. These aspects are in part treated by research methodologies and some innovative industrial solutions, but also these approaches present some limitations. The paper identifies future research directions for RIAs to fully support their development process and to support their design in a more comprehensive and systematic way, from both industrial and research perspectives.

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