A Systematic Approach for Configuring Web-Based Information Systems

Abstract

Enterprise information systems consist of interrelated Intranet and Internet-based applications, thus the Web platform serves well as the middleware for their development. Using a Web Browser, it is possible to download the user interface of any web-based application from anywhere around the world, providing transparency in application implementation. A web-based information system can be described as a set of web-based applications and the underlying infrastructure (both Intranet and Internet). Although most information systems built to support current technological treads are based on this architecture, they often fail to provide the desired performance. A potential cause is that, configuration issues, although interrelated, are solved in isolation. As the underlying network topology strongly influences application configuration, the relationship between the resource allocation policy and network architecture should be explored. We, thus, argue that a systematic approach for the quantitative analysis, effective configuration and detailed performance evaluation of web-based information systems is required. Four discrete stages are identified. The consistent representation of system specifications throughout all configuration stages facilitates the exploration of their dependencies even if these aren't obvious. For this purpose, we propose a common meta-model, incorporating specific characteristics of web-based systems. UML-like notation was adopted for system specification representation. Two are the main advantages of the proposed meta-model: extendibility, facilitating the description of applications at different levels of abstraction, and consistency, ensuring the accurate estimation of the Quality of Service parameters imposed to the underlying network by the described applications. A case study where the proposed approach was used for configuring a complex web-based system and the experience obtained are also discussed.

Employing Zachman Enterprise Architecture Framework to Systematically Perform Model-Based System Engineering Activities

“…For each service, a service description sub-view is defined indicating network infrastructure resources needed for its execution. The load imposed to network infrastructure resources each time the service is executed is expressed using operations selected from a predefined set called Operation Dictionary [21]. Service Description and Operation Dictionary sub-views will be further described latter after discussing Requirements view.…”

“…Since service functionality can be complex, it is not easily described in terms of the amount of information processed, stored or transferred during its execution. To facilitate the progressive estimation of load parameters, a set of operations are defined for the description of service load requirements [21]. Operations are selected from a predefined set defined in Operation Dictionary sub-view, which comprises application and elementary operations.…”

Extending UML 2.0 to Augment Control Over Enterprise Information System Engineering Process

“…The metamodel entities are presented in the next section through the profile description. Detailed description of the main entities can be found in [7].…”

“…Thus, tool coordination and internal metamodel transformation should be supported. The main advantage of the methodology proposed in [7] for web-based system configuration is the adoption of a common metamodel for the representation of systems throughout all configuration stages, ensuring interoperability and model consistency. Although, this is not feasible in the case of integrating autonomous software tools, an overall common metamodel can be adopted acting as a "reference point", while partial transformations of the common metamodel into toolspecific metamodels may be also supported.…”

Introducing a Uml Profile for Distributed System Configuration

“…In (Nikolaidou et. al, 2005) a systematic approach for configuring web-based distributed systems was proposed.…”