WorkShop 8 Ruby on Rails Workshops Report and Evaluation

Please read the Wiki Interact . Thanks

WorkShop 7 End of the Line: Production Site Migration and Maintenance

Please read the Wiki Interact . Thanks

Workshop 6 Enjoying the Ride: Web framework Alternatives, Scalability and Flexibility

Please read the Wiki Interact . Thanks

Workshop 5 Admiring the scenery Forms, AJAX Screen Layout and Mobile Interfaces

1. Ideas for customers enhancing experience on Web 2.0 and mobile technologies

Sales and marketing. Web 2.0 sites provide new sales and marketing venues for companies—ones that are often already geared demographically to certain populations. For example, companies that want to target professionals may choose to advertise on LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking site, whereas companies targeting the youth market may advertise on FunkySexyCool, a mobile-oriented social network run in cooperation with MTV. In addition, these new online sales and marketing channels compare very favorably to traditional channels in terms of cost. Also, with the mobile technologies, customers can get into different channels at anytime and anywhere they want.
Customer service. Web 2.0 platforms offer companies the ability to create very interactive high-quality customer service sites that network together customers, staff, and suppliers. In addition, companies can create customer service sites moderated by full-time employees that encourages end-user created content and wide participation among users—enhancing consumers’ customer service experience and building loyalty. ( BoozAllen, 2007)

2. Software, hardware, networking, systems, procedures and personnel would be needed to support the Developers in order to provide mobile device interfaces to the OTBS in a stage 2 project. There are four critieria we have to care about :-

- User friendliness
- Didactic efficiency
- Technical feasibility
- Cost effectiveness

The diagram below shows the delivery options , deployment languages and plateforms can be used for the mobile device interface (Attewell, 2005)

3.The improved business process can be divided into four different steps

- Customer contacts the call centre through any of the channels available (telephonist, Interactive Voice Response, Internet etc).

- The confirmation of location process starts. The main objective is to identify the origin of the customer.

- The dispatch system allocates a car.

- The car is contacted and it picks up the customer

This new business process system performs a large number of measurements. The company has been able to identify savings by a reduction of the distance from vehicle to customer . Other benefits for taxi drivers are better information access, new services available and improved work environment. Customers experience reduced estimated time of arrival and faster reservation process. The traffic control office is able to perform real-time information retrieval from the cars and at the same time benefits from location based retrieval advantages, improved information retrieval from the mobile resources and finally, real time notification advantages are also achieved. (Heijden, 2002)

References:

1. BoozAllen, 2007, " Companies to adapt to Web. 20 "<http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/The_Urgent_Need_for_Companies_to_Adapt_to_Web_2.0.pdf>

2. Heijden, 2002, " Buisness Process"
<http://is2.lse.ac.uk/asp/aspecis/20020043.pdf>

3. 2. Attewell, J., & Savill-Smith, C. (2005), ‘Mobile learning anytime everywhere: A book of papers from MLEARN 2004
<http://elearning.typepad.com/thelearnedman/mobile_learning/reports/mLearn04_papers.pdf>

Exercise 26: System Integration

1. I chose Business Process Analysis

2a. Enterprise Resource Planning is actually a process or approach which attempts to consolidate all of a company's departments and functions into a single computer system that services each department's specific needs. It is, in a sense, a convergence of people, hardware and software into an efficient production, service and delivery system that creates profit for the company. Primary benefit, prior to ERP, each department may be considered an independent fiefdom. Once a department's particular function is completed, it no longer cares for what happens afterwards. Efforts to integrate the system before always met with the stumbling block of different software and procedures. A sales person could not access the finance database to find out the customer's billing status, nor can he easily access the warehouse, inventory or delivery to find out the status of the customer's order.

2b. Customer Relationship Management is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprisee manage customer relationships in an organized way. For example, an enterprise might build a database about its customers that described relationships in sufficient detail so that management, salespeople, people providing service, and perhaps the customer directly could access information, match customer needs with product plans and offerings, remind customers of service requirements, know what other products a customer had purchased, and so forth. (TechTarget, 2009)

2c. Workflow Management is the management of business processes with information technology. By defining, analyzing, and redesigning an organization's resources and operations, workflow management systems ensure that the right information reaches the right person or computer application at the right time.(Aalst, 2009)

My bank is using CRM and the benefits are as follows

- Helping an enterprise to enable its marketing departments to identify and target their best customers, manage marketing campaigns and generate quality leads for the sales team.
- Assisting the organization to improve telesales, account, and sales management by optimizing information shared by multiple employees, and streamlining existing processes (for example, taking orders using mobile devices)
- Allowing the formation of individualized relationships with customers, with the aim of improving customer satisfaction and maximizing profits; identifying the most profitable customers and providing them the highest level of service.
- Providing employees with the information and processes necessary to know their customers, understand and identify customer needs and effectively build relationships between the company, its customer base, and distribution partners.

References

1. Tech-Faq, 2009, " Enterprise Resource Planning"

<http://www.tech-faq.com/enterprise-resource-planning-erp.shtml>

2. TechTarget, 2009," Customer Relationship Management"

<http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid11_gci213567,00.html>

3. Aalst, 2009, " Workflow Management"

<http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=8633&ttype=2>

Exercise 25: M-commerce and the E-Wallet : Innovation and Mobile Devices

A location-based service (LBS) is an information and entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device. LBS services can be used in a variety of contexts, such as health, work, personal life, etc. LBS services include services to identify a location of a person or object, such as discovering the nearest banking cash machine or the whereabouts of a friend or employee. LBS services include parcel tracking and vehicle tracking services. LBS can include mobile commerce when taking the form of coupons or advertising directed at customers based on their current location. They include personalized weather services and even location-based games. They are an example of telecommunication convergence. (Wikipedia, 2009)

Current wireless location based services are growing much slower than expected. One of the major problems is the inefficiency of geographic coordinates such as longitude/latitude and UTM. These coordinates require more than 20 characters at a resolution of meters that are difficult for people to remember and communicate. They are also difficult to be displayed on and input into small wireless devices. All these make geographic coordinates nearly useless to general consumers.

This technology has two barriers to overcome before it liberates great power. The first barrier is vast public awareness. If people don’t know the technology and its advantages, they will not use any features brought by the technology, and all these services will not have any advantages because of the introduction of the technology. The second barrier is wide availability of Universal Addresses. If people don’t know their Universal Addresses, they still can’t benefit from the advantages of the technology either. To overcome these two barriers, it requires great influence and comprehensive services that most small or medium size companies are not able to accomplish. Therefore, only large companies with large influence in the society and providing mass communication services can achieve the goal. An ideal candidate is a large telecommunication company which provides both wireless location based services and telephone catalogs for fixed phones.( Shen, 2003)

References :

1. Wikipedia, 2009, " Location Base Service"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location-based_service>

2. Shen, 2003," Problem and Solution , "Wireless Location Base Service"

<http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/features/nacjan03/>

Exercise 24: Virtual Business Worlds and Cyberagents

1. The term "software agents" describes a software abstraction, an idea, or a concept, similar to OOP terms such as methods, functions, and objects.[citation needed] The concept of an agent provides a convenient and powerful way to describe a complex software entity that is capable of acting with a certain degree of autonomy in order to accomplish tasks on behalf of its user. (Wikipedia, 2009) and they have various types of agents :
- Intelligent Software Agent
- Autonomous Agent
- Distributed Agent
- Multi-agent System
- Mobile Agent
- Fuzzy Agent
2. Intelligent Software Agent and Fuzzy Agent would be applied to the Artificial Intellegience and while Statistical Techiques would use under Mobile Agent.

4. Rocky - LC_MOO

I found the bot only recongized the keyword only and give certain response, for instances, I type in Hello, the response is ..hmm is that so , therefore, it is meaningless, however, when I type in Hi then the response is correct , hi , how are you ? Again, I typed in thanks then it will response you are welcomed, therefore, i believed, all the keyword is alreayd be hardcode with certain responses.

References:
1. Wikipedia, 2009, " Agents"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent>

Exercise 23: Searching Mechanisms

1. A program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler. (Webopedia, 2009). It provides as a search engines like the yahoo search or google search.

2. A search engine that queries other search engines and then combines the results that are received from all. In effect, the user is not using just one search engine but a combination of many search engines at once to optimize Web searching. For example, Dogpile is a metasearch engine (Webopedia, 2009)

3. User meta-tag built it under your web page, use the search keyword as accurate describe your page, subcribe to the major web search sites, in order increase the chance of getting a good site ranking.

References :

1. Webopedia, 2009 " Spider"

<http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/spider.html>

2. Webopedia, 2009, "Metasearch Engine"

<http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/m/metasearch_engine.html>

Exercise 22: CRM, B2B and SCM Software

1. Customer relationship management (CRM) consists of the processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with its current and prospective customers. CRM software is used to support these processes; information about customers and customer interactions can be entered, stored and accessed by employees in different company departments. Typical CRM goals are to improve services provided to customers, and to use customer contact information for targeted marketing.(Wikipedia, 2009)

2. Business-to-business (B2B) describes commerce transactions between businesses, such as between a manufacturer and a wholesaler, or between a wholesaler and a retailer..(Wikipedia, 2009)

3. Supply chain management (SCM) is the management of a network of interconnected businessesinvolved in the ultimate provision of product and service packages required by end customers (Harland, 1996). Supply Chain Management spans all movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, and finished goods from point-of-origin to point-of-consumption (supply chain)..(Wikipedia, 2009)

References:

1. Wikipedia, 2009, " Customer Relationship Management"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management>

2. Wikipedia, 2009, "B2B"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B2B_e-commerce>

3. Wikipedia, 2009, " Supply Chain Management"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_chain_management>

Exercise 21: Shopping Cart Specifications

Shopping Cart Class Diagram

Exercise 20: Modeling and UML

Diagram show the modeling with UML (SESAR, 2009)

A. Class Diagram ( Jua, n.d.)


B. Case Diagram ( Jua, n.d.)

C. Sequenece Diagram ( Jua, n.d.)

D. Collaboration Diagram ( Jua, n.d.)

E. State Chart ( Jua, n.d.)

F. Activity Chart ( Jua, n.d.)

G. Component Diagram ( Jua, n.d.)

H. Deployment ( Jua, n.d.)

References :

1. SESAR, 2009," UML Component and Deployment Diagrams"

<http://ra.crema.unimi.it/turing/MATERIALE/Admin/corsi/ingSwBozen/sebozebprepexam.ppt >

2. Jua, n.d., " Unified Modified Language"

<http://jdjua.com/uml.htm>

Exercise 19: TP Monitors and Transaction Protocols

1. ACID is stand for Atomicity , Consistency, Isolation and Durability ( Microsoft, 2009)
- Atomicity is related to the begin and end of transation statement, once is started just like an atomic and the work is done.
- Consistency preserves data stability and transform from one to another
- Isolation allows concurrency of transaction to behave as one of the transaction running under the system
- Durability is a unit of recovery
2. Transaction processing monitors have been evolving for about 30 years (CICS was introduced in 1968) and have become powerful, high-speed server platforms for mission-critical applications. Some TP products like CICS and TUXEDO. TP monitors are operating systems for business systems whose applications are written in languages like COBOL. It may seem strange to call a TP monitor an "operating system," but because they control an application's entire environment, it's a fitting description. TP monitor systems automatically manage the entire environment that a business system runs in, including transactions, resource management, and fault tolerance. The business logic in TP monitors is made up of procedural applications that are often accessed through network messaging or remote procedure calls (RPC), which are ancestors of RMI. Messaging allows a client to send a message directly to a TP monitor requesting that some application be run with certain parameters. It's similar in concept to the Java event model. Messaging can be synchronous or asynchronous, meaning that the sender may or may not be required to wait for a response. RPC is a distributed mechanism that allows clients to invoke procedures on applications in a TP monitor as if the procedure was executed locally. The primary difference between RPC and RMI is that RPC is used for procedure -based applications and RMI is used for distributed object systems. With RMI, methods can be invoked on a specific object identity, a specific business entity. In RPC, a client can call procedures on a specific type of application, but there is no concept of object identity. RMI is object oriented; RPC is procedural. (O' Reilly. 2001)
Example Show the TP Monitor Process (ETH Zuerich, n.d.)

3. RPC is a point to point protocol in the sense that it supports the interaction between two entities: the client and the server, when there are more entities interaction with each other ( a client with two servers, a client with a server and the server with a database), RPC treats the call as independent of each other. However, the calls are not independent. Transactional RPC is the additional language contstructs and run time support to bundle serveral RPC calls into an atomic unit Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) -products provide an assured, asyncronous and connectionless method to exchange messages between processes. (ETH Zuerich, n.d.)
Digaram shows the basic MOM:

4. One-phase atomic commit protocol can have the decision to abort the process in server, this will affect the stability and consistency of the transaction, however, two phase commit protocol involved in the client side as well in order to abort the transaction, therefore, it is more secure and consistency on the transaction process.

References:

1. Microsoft, 2009, " ACID Properties"

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa719484.aspx>
2.O' Reilly, 2001,"Transaction Processing Monitor "
<http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/java-ent/ebeans/ch01_05.htm>
3. ETH Zuerich, n.d., " Example of TP Monitors"
<http://www.iks.inf.ethz.ch/education/ws05/eai/slides/lec3.pdf>

Exercise 18: Threading Demonstration in Python

This demonstration is showing how the locks and semaphore to control on the process. As the reports provide different results and the tasks are running one by one, each thread has to wait for one another to finish before it starts the new one . Therefore, the locks , semaphore and thread are the vital skills manipulate in the applications .

Exercise 17: Concurrency Terms

1. Thread Synchronisation requires that a running thread gain a "lock" on an object before it can access it. The thread will wait in line for another thread that is using the method/data member to be done with it. This is very important to prevent the corruption of program data if multiple threads will be accessing the same data. If two threads try to change a variable or execute the same method at the same, this can cause serious and difficult to find problems. Thread synchronization helps prevent this. (Wikianswer, 2009)

2. Locks is a technique that prevents processing of a file by more than one program or user at a time, ensuring that a file in use by one user is made unavailable to others. (Wikianswer, 2009)

3. A deadlock is a situation wherein two or more competing actions are waiting for the other to finish, and thus neither ever does.(Wikianswer, 2009)

4. Semaphores is hardware or software flag used to indicate the status of some activity.(Wikianswer, 2009)

5. Mutex (mutal exclusion) is programming flag used to grab and release an object. When data are acquired that cannot be shared or processing is started that cannot be performed simultaneously elsewhere in the system, the mutex is set to "lock," which blocks other attempts to use it. The mutex is set to "unlock" when the data are no longer needed or the routine is finished. (Wikianswer, 2009)

6. Thread in computer programming, a thread is placeholder information associated with a single use of a program that can handle multiple concurrent users. From the program's point-of-view, a thread is the information needed to serve one individual user or a particular service request. If multiple users are using the program or concurrent requests from other programs occur, a thread is created and maintained for each of them. The thread allows a program to know which user is being served as the program alternately gets re-entered on behalf of different users. (One way thread information is kept by storing it in a special data area and putting the address of that data area in a register. The operating system always saves the contents of the register when the program is interrupted and restores it when it gives the program control again.)(Wikianswer, 2009)

7. The language was organized around a series of events. Each time an event happened (for example, mouse click, pulling down a menu), the program would respond.(Wikianswer, 2009)

8. Waitable timer is a kernel object that is signaled at a certain time or at regular intervals. An asynchronous procedure call (APC) can be associated with a waitable timer to allow a callback function to be executed whenever the timer is signaled. The sample code in this article demonstrates how to do this. (Microsoft, 2006)

References

1. Wikianswer, 2009 " Thread Synchronisation"

<http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_Thread_Synchronization>

2. Wikianswer, 2009, " File-Locking"

<http://www.answers.com/topic/file-locking>

3. Wikianswer, 2009, " Deadlock"

<http://www.answers.com/topic/deadlock>

4. Wikianswer, 2009, "Semaphores"

<http://www.answers.com/topic/semaphores>

5. Wikianswer, 2009, " Mutex"

<http://www.answers.com/topic/mutex-technology>

6. Wikianswer, 2009, " Definition of Thread"

<http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_definition_of_thread>

7. Wikianswer, 2009." Event"

<http://www.answers.com/program%20event>

8. Microsoft, 2006," How To Use a Waitable Timer with an Asynchronous Procedure Call"

<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/184796>

Exercise 16: Authentication and Encryption Systems

1. E-bay is the e-commerce website that I look into. I found, it allows credit cards and paypal for the payment, also it is a security website with secure service level (SSL) . Therefore, while doing the transaction, the information is secure and safe. I trust this site for business.
2. VeriSign, Inc. is the trusted provider of Internet infrastructure services for the networked world. Billions of times each day, it provides SSL, identity and authentication, and domain name services allow companies and consumers all over the world to engage in trusted communications and commerce. It offers solution on SSL certificates, identity and authenication services, domain name services, code signing, internet defense network and enterprise security and communication services for e-commerce. (VeriSign, 2009).

3. Services and solutions are offered by trusted web site <http://www.trust-e.co.uk/>.

Central control & reporting, Pupil & product tracking, Online payments, Multi purse technology,Bio wedge legacy interface, Cash transactions & receipts, Revaluation @ epos, Biometric, pin & card.

References:

1. VeriSign, 2009 "Product and Services"

<http://www.verisign.com/products-services/index.html>