Open topics for undergraduate students (Prak.,Bakk.,DI,MS)

ViMoDE: A flexible IDE for View-based Modeling Framework

Description: View-based Modeling Framework (VbMF) [1] offers stakeholders such as business experts and IT experts a unified framework for modeling and development business processes. VbMF, which is implemented as Eclipse plugins, provides a number of tree-based graphical editors for manipulating views as well as template-based code generators for producing code from these views. A missing feature of existing VbMF implementation is to provide appropriate development perspectives for different stakeholders according to their particular interests. Eclipse perspective [2,3] is a promising approach to realize such a feature. A perspective is "a visual container for a set of views and editors (parts)". The goal of this work is to provide appropriate, customizable development perspectives to support different stakeholders interests.
Technologies: Eclipse, Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment (PDE), Eclipse perspectives, VbMF
Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of Java and Eclipse development
Payment: Not paid
Advisor: Huy Tran
Status: Open
Research area: Process-driven SOAs, Web service, View-based, Model-driven.
References: [1] View-based Modeling Framework
  [2]http://www.eclipse.org/articles/using-perspectives/PerspectiveArticle.html
[3] http://www.eclipsepluginsite.com/perspectives.html

A model-driven approach to supporting human interactions in process-driven SOAs
Description: In process-driven SOAs, a business process consists of a number of activities orchestrated in a certain order to achieve a particular business goal. The process's functionality is often exposed in terms of standard service interfaces. During the course of process execution, human interactions are often necessary to accomplish some tasks, for instance, submitting a purchase order to trigger an order processing process, accepting or declining a loan approval in a loan approval process, and so on. The (de facto) standards BPEL4People and WS Human Task are proposed to tackle these issues. Unfortunately, there are two issues that challenge the support of such human interactions: (1) These standards have not been fully supported by all process engines, and (2) The human interactions described by using these standards are additional concerns that make processes more complicated. A promising approach is to manage human interactions using separated views and generate code from these views [1]. Another approach is to automatic extract relevant information to generate Web-based interfaces through which people are connected with the processes in a human friendly manner.
Technologies: VbMF (optional), BPEL 2.0, Web services, BPEL engine (ActiveBPEL@Tomcat), HTML, XML, JavaScript.
Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of Web services, XML, and Web technologies (HTML, JavaScript)
Payment: No
Advisor: Huy Tran
Status: Open
Research area: Process-driven SOAs, Web service, human interactions.
References: [1] T. Holmes, H. Tran, U. Zdun, and S. Dustdar. Modeling Human Aspects of Business Processes - A View-Based, Model-Driven Approach, 4th ECMDA'08, June 2008

Enhance traceability between process design and implementation
Description: The gap between process design and implementation is challenging because of the difference of syntax and semantics as well as the difference of granularity. View-based Modeling Framework (VbMF) is a promising approach to bridging this gap by introducing different view models at high level and low level layer and supporting different granularities. The goal of this work is to improve the generation of trace links in both forward and reverse engineering tool-chain provided in VbMF.
Technologies: Eclipse, openArchitectureWare XPand template language, VbMF
Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of Java and Eclipse programming
Payment: No
Advisor: Huy Tran
Status: Open
Research area: Process-driven SOAs, Software Traceability, View-based, Model-driven
References [1] Huy Tran, Uwe Zdun, and Schahram Dustdar. VbTrace: Using View-based and Model-driven Development to Support Traceability in Process-driven SOAs, Software & System Modeling, Springer, 2010

Process-driven SOAs testing framework
Description: In process-driven SOAs, a process often consists of a number of activities orchestrated in a certain order to achieve a business goal. Some of process activities can invoke external services to accomplish a particular functionality. A testing framework that supports stakeholders in automatically generating mock up services based on process descriptions is very useful for process development and testing as well as for integrating legacy business applications.
Technologies: BPEL 2.0, WSDL, Java, frameworks [Apache CXF or Axis2], application servers [Tomcat or Geronimo or Jboss or etc.]
Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of Java, Web services, XML
Payment: No
Advisor: Huy Tran
Status: Open
Research area: Process-driven SOAs, BPEL, WSDL, Web services, testing framework
Last updated: 2009-11-08