Case Study

In the commercial world, SOA implementation practitioners are finding a gulf between tools, whether vendor-based or open source, and the practical first needs of customers. Future-facing tool developers are addressing problems of orchestration to achieve the SOA promise. Most corporations, however, have not yet established either the services to be abstracted, or the governance requirements around exposing those services, such as the right level of service granularity. This case study is based on recent experience in the utility and retail sectors. The drivers for each are compelling: a business-driven need for IT flexibility. Examples are provided to show that customers in both sectors need to develop their architecture and governance before attempting to choose the right tools. Confusion also exists between tools and off-the-shelf solutions in the SOA environment. The challenge of agile approach for SOA development is also examined.

Service Oriented Architecture Conceptual Landscape PART II

Contemporary architectural approach is for an orchestrated, agnostic, federated enterprise through the adoption of loosely-coupled open Service interfaces. The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm unifies dis­parate, heterogeneous technologies. It resurrects legacy technology silos with a Service ‘face-lift’ while maintaining their autonomy. Somewhat in its infancy as standards and methodologies are evaluated and adopted, the differences between theory and praxis of SOA remain to be fully de­termined, predominately due to the size and complexity of the conundrum it addresses.

Creating Successful Portals with a Design Framework

Portal practitioners face the difficulties of creating effective information architectures for portals, dashboards, and tile-based information environments using only flat portlets. This article introduces the idea of a system of standardized building blocks that can effectively support growth in content, functionality, and users over time. In enterprise and other large scale social settings, using standardized components allows for the creation of a library of tiles that can be shared across communities of users. It then outlines the design principles underlying the building block system, and the simple guidelines for combining blocks together to create any type of tile-based environment.

Toward Introducing Semantic Capabilities for WSRP

The emergence of web services technology has introduced a problem: how can we ensure that requests are successfully matched with advertisements when consumers and producers may use different terminology to describe the same service or the same terminology to describe different ones? Popular approaches to solving this problem are reviewed which involve the use of ontologies to improve the semantic content of the matchmaking process. When services are presentation-oriented rather than merely data-oriented, another layer of difficulty is introduced. The architecture of Web Services for Remote Portlets is discussed extensively, including the interaction cycle between the client and the producer to maintain state variables for each remote session of a portlet to provide sufficient background for readers. A comparison is made between the way concepts are implemented in two different portlet specifications – IBM Portlet API and JSR168 specification. Architecture is proposed to support the automated use of dynamic services for remote portlets, the motivation for which is the lack of expressivity of the current standards to represent the semantic requirements and capabilities of data and user-facing web services.

Evaluating Students’ Perceptions of Interactive Response System (IRS)

A classroom interactive technology, Interactive Response System (IRS) such as NXTudy, is getting popular in the campus. However, little research has explored how students feel regarding to using IRS, and less solid models have been established to depict students’ behaviors systematically. This study develops a model to formulate university students’ perceptions, attitudes and actionable feedback in terms of using IRS by extending Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). A survey was conducted to examine the proposed model and confirm the factor “perceived usefulness” is the most important factor. Instructors should explain the importance of using technology before the class starts and repeat the benefits constantly to enhance students’ understandings, making students realize the usefulness of the technology to raise their intention to use, satisfaction and the willingness of recommending others to use the technology.

Mobilising the Enterprise

This article examines current mobile Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) research concerns and presents approaches to the challenges of enterprise support for mobility.

WebSphere Portal 6.1

Contemporary architectural approach is for an orchestrated, agnostic, federated enterprise through the adoption of loosely-coupled open Service interfaces. The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm unifies dis­parate, heterogeneous technologies. It resurrects legacy technology silos with a Service ‘face-lift’ while maintaining their autonomy. Somewhat in its infancy as standards and methodologies are evaluated and adopted, the differences between theory and praxis of SOA remain to be fully de­termined, predominately due to the size and complexity of the conundrum it addresses.

Adaptation and Recommendation in Modern Web 2.0 Portals

In this paper, we propose a generic recommender framework that allows transparently integrating different recommender engines into a Portal. The framework comes with a number of preinstalled recommender engines and can be extended by adding further such components. Recommendations are computed by each engine and then transparently merged. This ensures that neither the Portal vendor, nor the Portal operator, nor the user is burdened with choosing an appropriate engine and still high quality recommendations can be made. Furthermore we present means to automatically adapt the Portal system to better suit users needs.

Every Need to be Alarmed

Demand for contemporary IT systems to support chronic availability, expansive integration and extensibility has never been greater. Distributed infrastructures and particularly, the advent of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) introduce new challenges for meeting these demands. Despite architectural conventions to prescribe a common structure and simplifed approach, these systems are becoming more complex, heterogeneous and critical. Comprehensive System Management is no longer a luxury. Faults and potential failures have to be identified, isolated and addressed, and ideally pre-emptively. Our front-line indicators are alarms

Web Portals Research

The topic of Web Portals, despite appearing to cover quite a narrow area, is an extremely diverse one. Amongst other things, it covers the technology of portals, how portal software is implemented and the many and varied applications and business uses to which portals can be put. This chapter investigates various approaches to portals research, concentrating on research related to the human aspects of portals and portal applications. It also introduces the idea that as a portal must be adopted before it can be used a worthwhile approach is to consider the portal as an innovation. The chapter then distinguishes between inventions and innovations and argues that there is nothing automatic about adoption of an innovation, and that this adoption can best be investigated through the lens of innovation theory. In particular, the chapter looks at how innovation translation, from actor-network theory, can be used in this regard and offers examples of how this can be done.