IEEE Internet Computing

In an effort to help government officials anticipate significant events such as political unrest, disease outbreaks, or natural disasters, the US government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency is launching a mass dataset mining effort, hoping to develop technologies that can mine disparate sources such as blogs, search engine results, Internet traffic, webcams, and many others. Resear... View full abstract»

Data management for stateful Web applications is extremely challenging. Applications must scale as they grow in popularity, serve their content with low latency on a global scale, and be highly available, even in the face of hardware failures. This need has generated a new class of Internet-scale data management systems. Yahoo has more than 100 user-facing applications and numerous internal platfo... View full abstract»

The growing number of datasets published on the Web as linked data brings both opportunities for high data availability and challenges inherent to querying data in a semantically heterogeneous and distributed environment. Approaches used for querying siloed databases fail at Web-scale because users don't have an a priori understanding of all the available datasets. This article investigates the ma... View full abstract»

Distributed NoSQL systems aim to provide high availability for large volumes of data but lack the inherent support of complex queries often required by overlying applications. Common solutions based on inverted lists for single terms perform poorly in large-scale distributed settings. The authors thus propose a multiterm indexing technique that can store the inverted lists of combinations of terms... View full abstract»

Data delivered over the Internet is increasingly being used to provide dynamic and personalized user experiences. Queries over fast-changing data from distributed data sources are executed to create content to be delivered to users. Because these queries require data from multiple sources, they're executed at intermediate proxies or data aggregators. The authors discuss various techniques for exec... View full abstract»

Service-oriented architectures and Web services are well-established paradigms for developing distributed applications. However, Web services face problems when accessing, moving, and processing large datasets. To address this problem, the authors present ProxyWS, which uses myriad protocols to transport large amounts of data. ProxyWS undertakes data transfers on behalf of legacy Web services and ... View full abstract»

Browser-side templating (BST) is a valid alternative for Web development, even when it comes to building accessible applications. BST processes templates in the browser using a JavaScript-coded engine, providing significant performance improvements and making model-view separation a reality. However, it also has significant drawbacks. BST's dependence on JavaScript affects its accessibility and hi... View full abstract»

Cloud computing represents today's most exciting computing paradigm shift in information technology. However, security and privacy are perceived as primary obstacles to its wide adoption. Here, the authors outline several critical security challenges and motivate further investigation of security solutions for a trustworthy public cloud environment. View full abstract»

Allowing one Web service to act on our behalf with another has become increasingly important as social Internet services such as blogs, photo sharing, and social networks have become widely popular. OAuth, a new protocol for establishing identity management standards across services, provides an alternative to sharing our usernames and passwords, and exposing ourselves to attacks on our online dat... View full abstract»

Are we facing a second software crisis, brought about by increasing complexity in distributed systems? When faced with extreme heterogeneity, we must rethink solutions to traditional systems problems. Here, the authors advocate a new style of emergent middleware to tackle the interoperability problem. View full abstract»

Steve Jobs' world-changing innovations at Apple are usually considered to be his marriage of art and technology. Here, the author argues that the major changes in our world resulted from clever business models, especially those that created ecosystems in which other parties could participate. Moreover, we have Jobs to thank for a major world-changing technology: Wi-Fi. View full abstract»

Webmachine is a Web toolkit unlike any other. Whereas typical Web frameworks focus on programming language first, sprinkling pieces of HTTP into the mix where convenient, Webmachine puts HTTP semantics front and center. In doing so, it handles much of the HTTP "heavy lifting" for applications, and helps them perform as good Web citizens that work well with other Web components such as caches, prox... View full abstract»

Programmers must understand the mechanisms of malware attacks if they're to defend against them. Some believe programmers should also be taught and even practice both attacks and defense under controlled conditions. The notion of practicing attacks and writing malware is controversial. Further development of forensic tools and learning to use them will complement a curriculum designed to prepare p... View full abstract»