Internetware: An Emerging Software Paradigm for Internet Computing

Abstract

The Internet is undergoing a tremendous change towards the globalized computing environment. Due to the open, dynamic and uncontrollable natures of the Internet, software running in the Internet computing environment has some new features, which bring challenges to current software technologies in terms of software model, software operating platform, software engineering approaches and software quality. Researchers in China have proposed the term "Internetware" to present the emerging software paradigm. Sponsored by the National Basic Research 973 Program, several research practices have been done on the Internetware in the past decade. This paper summarizes the progress and status of the Internetware researches. A technical solution framework for the Internetware paradigm is proposed from four aspects: the Internetware software model defines what the Internetware is to be; the Internetware middleware determines how to run the Internetware applications; the engineering methodology determines how to develop the Internetware applications; the Internetware quality assurance determines how well the Internetware applications can perform. The paper also discusses the ongoing research issues and future trends of Internetware.

Evolution for the sustainability of internetware

“…Decades ago, software entities were developed in a fairly "unstructured" and "closed" manner, seen as software engineers were used to address on nothing more but current requirements, running on particular platforms and limited types of hardware [5]. Nowadays, the world has entered a revolutionary software paradigm.…”

“…Cooperative stands for the predesigned interacting and collaborating capabilities of Internetware software, which relies on appropriate medium over the Internet [5]. Their preserved interfaces and predefined protocols allow them to compose and integrate appropriately so as to deal with larger and complex tasks.…”

“…The consequences of these coupled software units acting "randomly" come in two folds: in some situations, they may result in positive contributions due to the fact that their flexible composite-ability may amplify their applicability; in other cases, they may also expose unforeseen issues or produce unwilling results due to the exponential rising possibilities of their compositions [5].…”

Retrieving and Composition Method of Internetware Components

“…The network platform has strong distribution, high degree of autonomy nodes and the connection environment is diverse and complex. In order to adapt to the complicated network platform, the software generates a new paradigm that is called internetware [1][2][3][4]. The internetware is not only able to perceive the changes of the external network environment, can also adjust itself in a certain degree according to the changes, as much as possible to meet the needs of users.…”

“…But in this process, there is a need to solve the following two questions: (1) how to find the components the users need in the internetware component library quickly; (2) how to combine the internetware components efficiently to achieve the needs of the users because single internetware cannot meet all the users' functions.…”