Masterarbeit
Error and Conflict Prevention in Collaborative Composite Web Applications
Aufgabenstellung
The CRUISE mashup runtime environment enables users to build and use individual rich internet applications by combining arbitrary, uniformly encapsulated components. The resulting composi-tions can be reconfigured during runtime by end users without programming skills. Beside single user scenarios, a distributed client server runtime environment empowers also a collaborative us-age of mashup applications. Thereby, users are able to combine heterogeneous components as well as assign different access rights to different parts of their application to use them in parallel with others. The basic assumption is, that application components which originally were created for a single user usage, can be used for collaborative use cases too. For this purpose, the mashup envi-ronment provides a transparent synchronization approach, which replicates state changes indicated by the public interface of the components to all collaborative partners.
Thereby, members of a collaborative group have to face a number of potential error or conflict situations. They can be caused, for example, by synchronization dropouts of the runtime environment, to restrictive sharing definitions or concurrent state changes of multiple clients.
While error and conflict handling is already well studied in traditional collaborative software architectures, the special characteristics of component-based architectures are not analysed yet. Basically, a master thesis within this research area has to tackle the following research questions: Which kind of errors and conflicts can appear within a collaborative mashup-platform? Which of these are caused by the special characteristics of the environment? Which of them can be automatically detected? Which errors or conflicts can be remedied automatically? How error notifications and resolution recommendations can be presented to end-users with no programming knowledge? How can errors may be prevented by, e. g., better user guidance?
To answer these research challenges, the following sub goals should be achieved within this thesis:
- Creation of representative scenario descriptions and analysis of mashup-specific error and conflict situations. Derivation of requirements for a conflict resolution system.
- Analysing the current state of the art in conflict and error management for web-based collaborative applications in general as well as for collaborative web mashups in particular.
- Classification of possible errors and conflicts within a collaborative mashup environment with regard to their location and reason of occurrence and whether they can be automatically detected, resolved or prevented.
- Specification of a concept which enables the detecting, resolving or prevention of selected cases from the created classification.
- Evaluation of the concept by prototypical implementing the core elements of the concept. Discussion of potential limitations of the concept and the implementation.
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Kateryna Baskenova