New Book on Web Engineering

A new book on Web Engineering has recently been published at Springer London. "Web Engineering: Modelling and Implementing Web Applications" presents the state of the art of approaches for obtaining a correct and complete Web software product from conceptual schemas, represented via well-known design notations. We contributed the section "The Web as an Application Platform", in which we highlight the specific challenges of distributed Web-based systems.

Cooperation with LIFIA

Triggered by the research visit at LIFIA a few weeks ago, a cooperative project has now been initiated between the two groups. This involves a student thesis conducted at La Plata in the area of composition with respect to business processes, workflows and data integration.

Student projects with idFS underway

The reengineering of idFS V2.2 is paying off again, as it is now being used within two student projects at the DSS group. One is using it for the protection of a Web application, possibly extending idFS with a new identity provider to authenticate against the university-wide account system. The other one is concerned with building a more capable and flexible identity store, adding more interfaces and management features.

Joining the Force

We recently managed to recruit some new members for the DSS. Ronny Jahn has joined us as a student assistant and has already started to help us with the reconstruction of our homepage. He will be accompanied by a second student assistant, Sebastian Brandt.

Trip to LA-WEB / LIFIA - Resumé

While the LA-WEB conference felt quite short, it gave some interesting insights, especially in the direction of search and advertisement. One interesting point was for example to see the new developments of Yahoo, who now has some semi-structured search features that almost look like semantic search. Moreover, I got some feedback for our own presented work on change propagation in distributed Web-based systems, e.g. the idea to put more effort in pro-active change announcement via the notion of deprecation etc.