Abstract:The vision of 'Internet as a computer' motivates many technical trends, like pervasive computing, grid computing, service computing and recently, cloud computing, as well as some business trends, like modern service industry, digital economy and smarter planet. These evolutionary changes demand that the software systems which are running on the open and dynamic Internet have to be autonomous, context-sensitive, continuous-reactive, evolutionary, and proactive, and the software entities dispersed on distributed nodes over the Internet will be turned into self-contained, autonomous and adaptive. Thus, like the information Web, i.e. the World Wide Web, these Internet-based software entities will constitute a software Web. That gives birth a new software paradigm. A portmanteau term 'Internetware' is used to denote the future software-web. An Internetware system will be able to perceive the changes of the open and dynamic environment, respond to the changes, and exhibit the context-aware, adaptive and trustworthy behaviors. The mission of Internetware may challenge many aspects of software technologies, from the operating platforms and the programming models to the engineering approaches. Internetware 2010, the second Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware, aims to provide an interactive forum where researchers and professionals from multiple disciplines and domains meet and exchange ideas to explore and address the challenges brought by Internetware. The symposium was held at Suzhou, China, during the 2-4 of Nov, 2010. Thirty three papers were submitted and each of them was reviewed by at least two members of an International Program Committee. Among them, 12 have been accepted (which means an acceptance rate of 36%) for their quality as well as for their interesting terms of discussions for the symposium attendees. This special issue contains 7 revised and substantially extended papers from the 12 based on presentations at the symposium: ......

Abstract:Current cloud computing systems pose serious limitation to protecting users' data confidentiality. Since users' sensitive data is presented in unencrypted forms to remote machines owned and operated by third party service providers, the risks of unauthorized disclosure of the users' sensitive data by service providers may be high. Many techniques for protecting users' data from outside attackers are available, but currently there exists no effective way for protecting users' sensitive data from service providers in cloud computing. In this paper, an approach is presented to protecting the confidentiality of users' data from service providers, and ensures that service providers cannot access or disclose users' confidential data being processed and stored in cloud computing systems. Our approach has three major aspects: 1) separating software service providers and infrastructure service providers in cloud computing, 2) hiding information of the owners of data, and 3) data obfuscation. An example to show how our approach can protect the confidentiality of users' data from service providers in cloud computing is given. Experimental results are presented to show that our approach has reasonable performance.

Abstract:Mobile devices are more and more popular in recent years. As a result, there're huge requests of mobile applications, especially those integrated with multiple information. However, on one hand, most of the mobile applications at present just contain some certain kinds of information and they cannot adapt to the rapid change of users' requirements, either. On the other hand, to build these applications, it's usually time consuming and there are not enough resource components with programmable interfaces. In this paper, we propose an approach based on Internerware to building web page integration applications for mobile device. We introduce a framework that provides abundant internet-programmable interfaces, a flexible integration mechanism to meet the users' rapid changing requirements and a reliable mechanism that guarantees the quality of the referred resources effectively. With this framework, we can rapidly build an application that integrates all the information according to users' requirement.

Abstract:With the increasing maturity of model-driven tools and methods, new model-based analysis methods are developed to support specific stakeholder concerns during software lifecycle. This multiplication of models and their related analysis tools calls for solution addressing the integration of MOF-based analysis methods. Current research works on integration of analysis methods have already addressed the extraction of the needed input data as well as the control and the integration of the tools supporting the analysis execution. However, little attention has been paid to the integration of analysis results back into initial model. We propose an MOF-based framework enabling the integration of analysis results that a) defines a meta-model capturing the integration requirements, b) provides an MOF meta-model extension mechanism with support for upward compatibility; and c) automatically generates a model transformation for model integration. We illustrate the use of our framework by integrating a reliability analysis methods and a fault tolerant reconfiguration method on the ABC/ADL Software Architecture. We applied the resulting analysis composition onto the ECPerf JEE system.

Abstract:Internetware intends to be a paradigm of Web-based software development. At present, researches on Internetware have gained daily expanding attentions and interests. This paper proposes an agent based framework for Internetware computing. Four principles are presented that are followed by this framework. They are the autonomy principle, the abstract principle, the explicitness principle and the competence principle. Three types of agents with di?erent responsibilities are designed and specified. They are the capability providing agents, the capability planning agents and the capability consuming agents. In this sense, capability decomposition and satisfaction turns to be a key issue for this framework and becomes a communication protocol among these distributed and heterogenous agents. A capability conceptualization is proposed and based on the conceptualization, an agent coalition formation mechanism has been developed. This mechanism features that (1) all the participants make their one decisions on whether or not joining the coalition based on the capability realization pattern generated by the capability planning agents as well as the benefits they can obtain; and (2) the coalition selection is conducted by a negotiation process for satisfying the expectations of all the participants as the complexity of this problem has been proven to be NP-complete.

Abstract:Recent pervasive systems are designed to be context-aware so that they are able to adapt to continual changes of their environments. Rule-based adaptation, which is commonly adopted by these applications, introduces new challenges in software design and verification. Recent research results have identified some faulty or unwanted adaptations caused by factors such as asynchronous context updating, and missing or faulty context reading. In addition, adaptation rules based on simple event models and propositional logic are not expressive enough to address these factors and to satisfy users' expectation in the design. We tackle these challenges at the design stage by introducing sequential event patterns in adaptation rules to eliminate faulty and unwanted adaptations with features provided in the event pattern query language. We illustrate our approach using the recent published examples of adaptive applications, and show that it is promising in designing more reliable context-aware adaptive applications. We also introduce adaptive rule specification patterns to guide the design of adaptation rules.

Abstract:Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) is a new approach for developing software, and it is characterized by its multi-tenancy architecture and its ability to provide flexible customization to individual tenant. However, the multi-tenancy architecture and customization requirements introduce many new issues in software, such as database design, database partition, scalability, recovery, and continuous testing. This paper proposes a hybrid test database design to support SaaS customization with two-layer database partitioning. The database is further extended with a new built-in redundancy with ontology so that the SaaS can recover from ontology, data or metadata failures. Furthermore, constraints in metadata can be used either as test cases or policies to support SaaS continuous testing and policy enforcement.

Abstract:The advent of Internet technology introduces a revolution to software application and development paradigms. Traditional software development and application patterns have been shifted to Internet-based service sharing and collaboration among partners across the Internet. This new paradigm imposes new challenges and complexity in the lifecycle of software development, deployment, execution and maintenance. Middleware, an intermediate layer to abstract the homogeneity and hide the di?erence of underlying systems, can be used to reduce the complexity of managing the lifecycle of Internet applications. In this paper, we exploit the needs of middleware support for Internet-based applications from a service perspective. We investigate the potential requirements and features of Internetware, and analyze the state-of-the-art solutions. We also discuss the remaining issues and their challenges, and explore the potential future research directions.