A New Paradigm for Web App Development, Deployment,
Distribution, and Collaboration
Chao Wu and Yike Guo
Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, U.K.
Keywords: Web Application, Web Development, Cloud-enabled Web Application.
Abstract: Web application is getting great prosperous while web browser is becoming one of the most important
platforms not only on PCs, but also on mobile devices. And web application producing and consuming are
going through a process of transformation sharped by the trends including Cloud computing, social
networking, online application store, etc. It’s necessary to look at the whole web application paradigm and
get vision for its future. In this paper, we gave our insight on the web application paradigm, discussing its
aspects of development, deployment, distribution, economic model, cloud platform, social diffusion and so
on, and represent both the architecture and implementation based on our understanding.
1 INTRODUCTION
Web browser is becoming a key platform for
applications. And Web applications have a superior
position in gathering users, and have advantages
including platform independency, no client side
deploying, better accessibility, etc. So they are
important for both producers and consumers.
Producers would like to deliver utility through Web
application to user, and gain considerable profit as
return. And users would like to gain utility to fulfil
their requirements within an acceptable budget. We
believe current paradigm of Web application cannot
fully fulfil demands from both sides.
For producers, their requirements include:
 Development: Web development could be
easier and take less time, if reusability could
reach a new level, and if much manual work
could be done automatically.
 Deployment: Deployment costs a lot of time
and money (for setting up machine, OS, Web
application server, database, libraries, domain
name, building environment, etc.).
 Scaling up: When user amount booms,
deployment server needs be to scale up easily.
 Distribution and promotion: it’s a challenge
for producers to sell and promote their
applications. They might spend a lot of time
on tasks like SEO, trying to get attention from
users.
 Understanding users’ requirement: developers
normally cannot meet users, and sometimes
can hardly understand users, which hinder
them from developing desired application.
 Cost and risk: Development, deployment,
scaling up, distribution, and all these activities
cost money. And the risk is that we do not
know whether the application would success
while spending money.
 Credit and reputation: Producers need to build
reputation among users, and their credit could
be an important indicator for collaboration in
developer community.
For consumers, their requirements include:
 Utilities and performance: Web application is
a mean of delivering utilities. User pays for
the utility they want, not those useless
functions. Also the performance should be
promising: a large amount of users would not
affect individual access.
 Accessibility: Web application should be
attached to a user, not a browser. Users access
their applications like their own instruments
whenever needed.
 Low cost: User just pays for the utility they
get. And there should have multiple pricing
schemas for an application to fit different
usage pattern.
 Participation: Users should be able to
participate application’s evolution, through
mechanism like social rating and feedback.
433
Wu C. and Guo Y..
A New Paradigm for Web App Development, Deployment, Distribution, and Collaboration.
DOI: 10.5220/0004072904330438
In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Software Paradigm Trends (ICSOFT-2012), pages 433-438
ISBN: 978-989-8565-19-8
Copyright
c
 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

User can claim their requirements to
encourage the producing of new application.
Also users can share or recommend
applications to their social network.
To meet these requirements, many technologies
have emerged in recent years:
 Cloud computing: Cloud computing (Hayes,
2008; Armbrust et al. 2009) provides a new way
of delivering computing as a service. It
enables the elasticity for resource
consumption, which is necessary in Web
application development in different levels: in
infrastructure level, services like Amazon EC2
allow developers to rent virtual computers to
host their Web applications; in platform level,
services like Google App Engine enable the
development and deployment in centrally
managed data centre. There are some other
services on Cloud designed for Web
application development, such as database
(Hacigumus, 2002) and testing. Notably, a few
platforms labled ”Cloud Enabled Application
Platform” (Natis et al., 2010) emerged.
 Tools for automation: The dream of
application development without programmers
was proposed many years ago (Martin, 1982).
Since then, many automatic methodologies
and tools are proposed and realized, such as
MDA (Sendall and Kozaczynski , 2003), and
tools like maven and jenkins. Now, the whole
producing cycle of Web application is
supported by these automatic methodologies
and tools.
 Web application marketplace: Both consumers
and producers benefit from the idea of
application store as a distribution platform.
Majority of application stores are distribution
platforms for mobile application, with the
model of distributing digital copies of mobile
applications and then installing them on users’
devices. But Web application means a
different story: the marketplace sells the utility
of the application, rather than copies.
 Social application: Many works have
discussed the impact of social network on
product diffusion. Web application could also
be promoted and diffused through social
networking approach. Facebook made this
approach real and popular. Currently, there are
many social games and other Web
applications relying on Facebook to gather
users.
These approaches facilitate the development of
Web application. However, concentrating on a
single aspect, rather than considering them as a
whole, limits their effects. For example, if there is
no economic consideration of distributing during
development phase, the application would be not
flexible for different pricing schemas. As a result,
we must consider these trends as a whole paradigm
for Web application. For such paradigm, we believe
four principles should be emphasized according to
our vision:
 Utility. Utility refers to the satisfaction
received from consuming a Web application.
Computation is about converting resources to
utilities, and delivering utilities to consumers.
The application producer consumes resources
from resource provider (such as cloud
provider), convert the resource (computation,
storage, etc.) with business logic to build a
service to deliver utility. Web application
consumer uses a Web application to gain the
utility without caring about the underlying
resource or way’s of constructing application.
So in designing Web application paradigm,
it’s crucial to make sure that it facilitates the
conversion and delivery of utility.
 Economics. Economic mechanism should be
adopted to drive the whole paradigm: 1)
producer would like to maximize its profit
with the budget of resource consuming for
converting a certain amount of utilities; 2)
consumer would like to maximize received
utilities within the budget of application
consuming. Consuming of both resources and
applications should have the properties of
elasticity, which means paying by their usage.
This ’pay by usage’ principle should be
considered not just in phase of distribution and
promotion, but also in development and
deployment.
 Automation. Many activities of Web
application producing could be standardized
and automatized, which increases the
reusability, lowers the cost, and saves the
time. For standardization and automation, it’s
important to design a platform rather than a
set of tools.
 Social Network. Applications are built for
users, and users make applications alive.
Users should be able to share applications and
recommend them to the others. They help the
evolution of an application by giving
feedback, requesting new feature, and
purchasing it. Users and developers should be
able to communicate with each other
efficiently. So it’s necessary to adopt a social
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network as a communication and collaboration
infrastructure to support the whole paradigm.
According to these principles, in this paper we
design an architecture and example system to
demonstrate our vision of new Web application
paradigm. Our architecture of new Web application
is presented in Section 2. And an implementation of
example system for demonstration and experiment is
described in Section 3. Finally, Section 4 gives the
conclusions and future work.
2 ARCHITECTURE
Based on the analysis before, in this section we give
reference architecture for Web application paradigm,
and the implementation would be presented in the
next section. The whole architecture is shown in
Figure 1, which could be viewed as four service sets
for development, deployment, marketplace, and
social network.
Figure 1: Architecture for Web application paradigm.
2.1 Development
Development should be done in an automatic
services aided environment to improve reusability
and productivity. These services include:
1. Initialization: Currently, to create a new Web
application, we need to setup the environment
containing OS, libraries, framework, Web server /
database server, etc. These preparation works would
be automatically done in a configured development
environment with necessary components, and then
delivered to developers with the form of 'Web
application template', which is the skeleton code for
a certain type Web application.
2. Management and teamwork: With this service,
developers could easily do the management job
including editing, testing, etc. These activities are
done with automatic tools support such as a
synchronized IDE workspace. And it's not necessary
for a project team to create and maintain its own
version control environment. Furthermore,
communication and collaboration features should
also be supported. Although there are lots of
communication and collaboration tools, it would be
better if they can be integrated with the development
environment.
3. Programming SDK: To fit the deployment,
marketplace, and social networking environment,
SDK should be provided to support: 1) the access to
the cloud service like data/storage, messaging, etc.;
2) the interfaces for marketplace like signal sign on,
usage monitoring, and restricted zone; 3) the
interfaces for social network like recommendation
and sharing; 4) the interoperability to support open
access.
4. Code marketplace: To improve the reusability,
a marketplace for source code could be provided,
where developers share or sell their codes and
components.
With these services, Web application
development would be done with the way shown in
Figure 2.
Figure 2: Web application development service.
2.2 Deployment
Automatic and continuous deployment is necessary
for Web application, making it easy to migrate from
development environment to deployment
environment, and from deployment environment to
application marketplace. It's desirable to utilize
Cloud infrastructure for deployment environment,
which overcomes the common problem of over-
provision or under-provision for Web application.
On Cloud, application server would be extended
with cloud-supporting functionality, such as
enabling multi-tenancy at the container level. Beside
application server, data/storage services are also
provided in cloud-based deployment environment.
We gave a design of extended application
container (EAC) in (Sijin et al., 2012).
Both the application server and data/storage
services should be implemented on the cluster, and
A New Paradigm for Web App Development, Deployment, Distribution, and Collaboration
435

support the function of resource monitoring and
dynamic provision. The cost of resource consuming
should be able accountable, and the deployment
ability can be scaled up or down when the users
request amount doesn't match the workload of
current deployment environment. With these
services, deployment would be done with the way
shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Deployment service.
2.3 Marketplace
Web application marketplace allows users to browse
and use Web applications either for free or at a cost.
Marketplace mechanism changes the ecology of
Web application producing and consuming as shown
in Figure 4. In traditional process of Web application
development and accessing, producers have an idea,
turn it to development activity, and deploy/publish
the application to the Web; Users have their demand
for some function, so they search or browse for
target application.
Figure 4: Change of ecology for Web application
producing and consuming.
It's not easy for the suppliers to meet the
requester. Marketplace provides a convenient place
for both sides to find each other. Users are easier to
find suitable application (through mechanisms in
marketplace like social rating, relevant app
recommendation, etc.). Producers could also quickly
find the demand from users.
Marketplace should be able to provide different
pricing schemas. Producers can choose one or
multiple pricing schemas suitable for their
application and then provide them to users. The
purchased applications can be accessed by users
through different forms of personal portal including
website, Web browser (with plug-in), and mobile
gateway application.
There should also be a crowdsourcing
marketplace for users to have a place to specify their
demand, and request developers to realize it. Some
successful examples of crowdsourcing platform
showed that using marketplace and economic
mechanism, producers would be well motivated and
organized.
2.4 Social Network
Social Network is a crucial infrastructure to support
Web application's distribution and collaboration,
providing following services:
 Application sharing.
 Application recommendation.
 Feedback and communication.
 Reputation and credit.
Summarization. With social networking infra-
structure, marketplace, and cloud-enabled applica-
tion development and deployment. The pattern of
Web application producing and consuming would
change, as shown in Figure 5. Marketplace and
social network are positioned in the centre, and
facilitate the flow of utilities, demands, resources
between consumer, producer, and application.
Figure 5: New pattern of Web application producing and
consuming.
3 IMPLEMENTATION
We implemented a platform for demonstration and
experiment, based on the principles and architecture
described before. The platform was built on IC
Cloud (Gu et al., 2010) as its cloud infrastructure,
and implemented with open protocols and tools
(including maven, jenkins, git, tomcat, etc.). The
platform has 6 subsystems, which would be
described below:
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3.1 Development Service
This subsystem provides a set of automatic services,
which make Web application development easier
and cost less. Here are the main services in this
subsystem:
1. Web Application Template and SDK. In this
platform, developers start development by creating a
Web project through a few clicks on the website, or
through commend line, or through the eclipse plug-
in.
Programming templates are provided, including
"Spring Java framework", "GWT App", etc. In
templates, a programming SDK is included with
APIs for:
 Single sign-on: provides user management and
single sign-on function. With it, users on the
platform access all the applications without
creating additional account.
 Usage monitoring: helps the application to
notify and record when a user is gaining the
utility from the application. It's similar to the
process of declaring a database transaction.
 Restricted zone: lets the application to declare
some part of its function is restricted and
could only be accessed after users pay for it.
 Data and storage service: enables the
application to access data and storage services
provided by the platform.
 Other APIs include OAuth support, URL
fetch, etc.
These APIs are mainly Web services provided by
deployment environment, so a test server is provided
for local development.
2. Code Repository and Automatic Build. A
git repository is created automatically for a project.
Once codes are pushed to git repository, the platform
would build the project automatically. Jenkins with
plugins like POM is adopted, so reports for building
could be accessed. After build, the project would be
automatically deployed to deployment environment.
3. IDE Support and Test Server. We integrated
development services and a test server in Eclipse, so
user can 1) create a new project; 2) access a new
data/storage services; 3) version control with git; 4)
and push code for deployment in Eclipse.
3.2 Deployment Environment
This subsystem provides a convenient way to deploy
and scale up Web application, with Cloud
infrastructure. Specifically, several services are
provided:
1. Application server cluster and load balancer:
Httpd load balancer and tomcat cluster are used to
build application server cluster. Tomcat application
server is packaged in a VM image, and created and
clustered automatically when needed.
2. Data and storage service: Three types of data
and storage services are provided: RDBMS services
based on MySQL cluster, NoSQL data services
based on MongoDB, and S3 style storage services.
3. Resource monitoring and scaling-up/scaling-
down: JavaMelody is adopted to monitor Web
application in application server node. Once the
request amount exceeds the capacity of current
cluster, deployment environment would scale up,
which is mainly the processing of allocating new
application server nodes, adding them to the cluster,
and deploying the application to them.
Developer can view the current scale of
deployment, or set it.
4. Interface to application marketplace: After
deployment, producers can publish the application to
Web application marketplace. Different pricing
schemas are supported, and producers can set single
or multiple pricing schemas for their applications.
3.3 User Service
This subsystem provides consumer interface to
search, browse, purchase, and access Web
applications. It contains following services:
1. Application marketplace: Users search,
browse, and purchase the (usage of) Web application
they needed. Different pricing schemas could be
chosen. Users can view their report of usage, as well
as related applications, user ratings, and other
information. With single sign-on function, all the
users in the marketplace become the potential user
for the application. With usage API, the usage of
user on an application would be logged, and the
usage report and billing would be automatically
generated.
2. Personal portal: Purchased Web
applications would be accessible from users'
personal portal. Meta-data of the purchase would be
checked by a filter to assure the users' permission.
User can access his/her portal through multiple
approaches including website, Web browser
(through plug-ins), and mobile device application.
3.4 Social Networking Interface
Services for social networking are provided:
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1. Application sharing and social promotion:
Users can share and recommend their applications
for their friends in Facebook.
2. Social rating and developer credit: Users can
directly rate the application, or indirectly rate it
through purchasing, sharing, and recommendation.
These social rating would be used as the basis to
determine the developers' credit.
3. Communication system: Users and developers
can communicate with each other. Developers could
ask for advice while the application is still in
prototyping.
3.5 Crowd Sourcing
This subsystem provides a place for end users to
post their requirement, and motivate developers to
fulfil it. Users can submit a post in requirement
marketplace, specifying the application they want, as
well as the reward.
3.6 Development Marketplace
This subsystem is provided to encourage the sharing
and reuse of code. Developers could share their
source code, and other developers can search the
code, and reuse it.
4 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
In this paper, we gave our vision of the new
paradigm for Web application, which is becoming
one of the most important types of application for
both users and developers. Our understanding of this
new paradigm emphasized the considerations of
utility, elasticity, economics, and social networking.
Based on these considerations, we designed
reference architecture and implemented an
experiment platform for demonstration. During the
presentation, we did not discuss much about the
technological detail, but tried to convey our overall
vision of this paradigm, because in practical
platform these details would very much.
For example, in our platform implementation, all
the services are included in a single system and
hosted in a signal data centre. However, in practice,
the whole paradigm could be formed with multiple
providers for different component, and hosted across
multiple data centres.
Many works are planned to be done in future,
such as how to federate the different service
providers to an integrated environment, how to
design a new type of copyright to fit the
crowdsourcing development, how to estimate the
application resources on the cloud so that application
producers can choose suitable pricing strategy, and
how to optimize the architecture of deployment
component during scaling-up. We would work on
these problems based this paper, and revise the
platform implementation continuously.
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