IEEE Internet Computing

Ideas Ahead of Their Time

When software ideas are ahead of their time, two problems can arise. Either better hardware is needed for the software to be feasible, a new technology isn't adoptable because there's no current need for it. EIC Fred Douglis looks at examples of both problems in this installment.

Cloud Computing: Interview with Russ Daniels and Franco Travostino

Milojicić discusses cloud computing with Russ Daniels, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Hewlett-Packard’s cloud services strategy, and Franco Travostino, a distinguished architect at eBay.

ICANN's TLD Plans Are Defined, Not Yet Refined

The ICANN board of directors' recent decisions to greatly expand the number of generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) and fast-track some country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) using internationalized characters illustrates that ICANN has stumbled into a quagmire; that is, in hoping to satisfy constituent groups' demands for expanded TLDs, it might expose profound procedural shortcomings that it must fix or suffer the consequences.

Services Mashups: The New Generation of Web Applications

Web services are becoming a major technology for deploying automated interactions between distributed and heterogeneous applications, and for connecting business processes. Service mashups indicate a way to create new Web applications by combining existing Web resources utilizing data and Web APIs. They facilitate the design and development of novel and modern Web applications based on easy-to-accomplish end-user service compositions.

Mashing Up Search Services

Mashup languages offer new graphic interfaces for service composition. Normally, composition is limited to simple services, such as RSS or Atom feeds, but users can potentially use visual mashup languages for complex service compositions, with typed parameters and well-defined I/O interfaces. Composing search services introduces new issues, however, such as determining the optimal sequence of search invocations and separately composing ranked entries into a globally ranked result. Enabling end users to mash up services through suitable abstractions and tools is a viable option for improving service-based computations.

Composing RESTful Services and Collaborative Workflows: A Lightweight Approach

The use of RESTful Web services has gained momentum in the development of distributed applications based on traditional Web standards such as HTTP. In particular, these services can integrate easily into various applications, such as mashups. Composing RESTful services into Web-scale workflows requires a lightweight composition language that's capable of describing both the control and data flow that constitute a workflow. The authors address these issues with Bite, a lightweight and extensible composition language that enables the creation of Web-scale workflows and uses RESTful services as its main composable entities.

An Online Platform for Web APIs and Service Mashups

On the newly programmable Web, mashups are flourishing. Designers create mashups by combining components of existing Web sites and applications. Although rapid mashup proliferation offers many opportunities, a lack of standarization and compatibility offers considerable challenges. IBM Sharable Code is an online service platform for developing and sharing situational Web 2.0 applications and mashups. The platform is based on an innovative domain-specific language that streamlines and standardizes the development and deployment of applications consuming and exposing Web APIs. Parts of the DSL and the resulting applications and mashups can be shared and reused by members of the IBM Sharable Code community. In this article, the authors offer an overview of the platform's architecture and the DSL language at its core.

Understanding Mashup Development

Web mashups are Web applications developed using contents and services available online. Despite rapidly increasing interest in mashups over the past two years, comprehensive development tools and frameworks are lacking, and in most cases mashing up a new application implies a significant manual programming effort. This article overviews current tools, frameworks, and trends that aim to facilitate mashup development. The authors use a set of characteristic dimensions to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of some representative approaches.

Toward Web-Scale Workflows for Film Production

The screen business encompasses all creative and management aspects related to film, television, and new media content, from concept to production and distribution. Companies in this industry face increasing competition due to market globalization. To stay competitive, they're turning to contemporary technology-enabled business improvement methods, such as business process management. Despite its potential benefits, the use of workflow systems for automating film production processes is largely unexplored. The authors' case study highlights some of the key challenges that lie ahead for Web-scale workflows for film production.

Taming Web Services from the Wild

Service-oriented computing is about building new cross-organizational applications by combining, composing, consuming, or interconnecting existing services. So, why do most composite Web service-based systems currently rely on pre-established relationships that aren't created by automated, dynamic discovery and integration? One perceived reason is the inconsistency in service-based interface descriptions and message names. Here, the authors investigate whether human nature — specifically, software developers' tendencies to name service descriptions in significantly consistent ways — can provide syntactical methods for service discovery.

Application-Layer Traffic Analysis of a Peer-to-Peer System

Characterizing traffic behavior helps to optimize the network architecture for improved performance. Using a modified LimeWire servent (for both the server and client) and a variance-time plot for traffic characterization, the authors analyze the Gnutella protocol's traffic shape and find that the messages exhibit a self-similar shape. This result shows network designers that they need to consider the self-similar traffic shape in their set-up — for instance, by introducing appropriate buffer sizes.

DCCP: Transport Protocol with Congestion Control and Unreliability

The Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) is a new transport protocol standard that the IETF recently proposed. Because DCCP simultaneously features congestion control and unreliable transmission, it's especially suited to multimedia streaming applications and has thus received much attention. This article introduces DCCP's main characteristics and operation.

Password Policy Purgatory

IT system users, (all of us), and administrators, (increasingly large numbers of us), must all manage some passwords. In this article, the author reviews some issues related to password policies and concludes that managing passwords, in any sensible manner, is becoming more and more of a nuisance for users, a factor that should be to the forefront when administrators are creating password policies.

How Will We Interact with the Web of Data?

The Web is currently evolving from an information space of linked documents, to a Web of linked, machine-readable data. Perhaps counter-intuitively, this shift to publishing data for machine consumption raises many challenges for human-computer interaction. In this article I will discuss some of the implications of this trend for how we interact with the Web of data and consider how familiar tools such as the Web browser may need to develop.

RPC and REST: Dilemma, Disruption, and Displacement

Technologists act as if the "REST vs. RPC" debate is purely technical, but technology choices are never really quite so black and white. This column examines the non-intuitive theories and evidence behind Clayton Christensen's "innovator's dilemma" to explore technology life cycles, discuss what makes different customers choose different technologies, and consider how different types of innovation affect the evolution of integration products.

ORGs for Scalable, Robust, Privacy-Friendly Client Cloud Computing

Organizations of restricted generality (ORGs) provide foundations for the development of more scalable, robust, and privacy-friendly Internet applications by incorporating multicore cloud computing into the client (desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, wall computers, handhelds, and so forth).

Modeling Healthcare Logistics in a Virtual World

The 3D virtual world Second Life provides a free computing platform for to terraform virtual landscapes, build imaginative buildings or spaces, meet, socialize, and collaborate. Some universities and businesses have experimented with virtual classrooms and virtual stores. This article describes the beginnings of an experiment to use Second Life as a modeling platform for understanding pervasive computing in the domain of healthcare, specifically by building a "hospital of the future," complete with virtual RFID for tracking and providing location-aware services, smart networked equipment, restocking robots and the beginnings of workflow automation for modeling many hospital business processes. The same technology could be used to optimize hospital supply chains, test technologies like RFID in a model before full scale deployment, educate and train personnel, and simulate applications in other domains like retail or battlefields. This virtual world platform gives us insight into a future world where humans can communicate with the things as easily as they do with other humans.