Practicum/Project Ideas

Claus Pahl:

[ Home ]

[ Publications ]

[ Projects ]

[ Activities ]

[ Teaching ]

[ Brief CV ]

These are projects suitable for MSE or MSSF students.
Please contact me by email (Claus.Pahl -at- dcu.ie), if you are interested in one of these project ideas.

GONE !!! (Web Service Prototyping)

Prototyping service-oriented architectures based on Web services is a complex process. Therefore, it is desirable to be able to create prototypes using more familiar constructs, entirely within a single programming language, and then define some of the components as web services, and others as clients.

The aim is to develop a tool which enables programmers to create web services and clients in ArchJava, an extension to Java which supports components and connectors as first class entities, by defining interfaces to services as ports on components.
This supports rapid creation of prototypes by defining a component and connector structure of a web service based system in ArchJava, and then later, with only minor modifications, change the prototype to use web services.

This project is based on ideas presented by Kristian Ellebaeck Kjaer at the European Conference on Software Architecture in 2007.

[ Top of page ]

Model-Driven Quality Engineering for Web Services

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Software quality aspects such as performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and calculating performance metrics of the implemented software.

The aim is to develop a tool for the empirical, model-based performance evaluation of services and service compositions in the context of model-driven service engineering. Temporal databases techniques can be utilised for the empirical performance evaluation of model-driven developed service systems.

This project is based on a research paper presented by colleagues (M. Boskovic and W. Hasselbring) from the University of Oldenburg and me at the Workshop on Emerging Web Service Technologies in 2007.

This project would also suit two students.

[ Top of page ]

GONE !!! (Architecture Transformation Tool)

The Web services platform and service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a methodological software engineering framework for service-based platforms promise interoperability benefits. Service-level integration of legacy systems and new components is a solution for a wide range of IT architecture problems.

The aim is to develop a software architecture transformation tool that, based on an existing system architecture, generates an architecture description in terms of Web service technologies such as WSDL and WS-BPEL. The existing system shall be specified in a common architecture description language such as ACME.

This project is linked to ongoing research in the group, which is supported by the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre Lero.

[ Top of page ]

GONE !!! Model-based OCL Generation

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is a constraint language, which can be used to minimise ambiguity in UML models. OCL can also be used to query information in UML models. We consider that the OCL can be used in other less technical domains for model querying and specifying model constraints. To allow for OCL to be used in these domains, specifying OCL queries and constraints must get more intuitive.

This project will consider a Model Driven Development (MDD) approach for creating OCL constraints for UML models that define an eLearning-based course. MDD is a highly topical research area, which uses models as the basis for generating software. In this project an intuitive modelling notation is sought for defining OCL constraints. A tool shall support this modelling notation.

[ Top of page ]