Section: New Results

Architecture design for intermediation platforms

Dice team designs software architectures for intermediation platforms. C3PO and BitBallot targets spontaneous and ephemeral social networks whereas Jumplyn focuses on pure central based system. All these architectures share a common JavaScript layout both at the client and the server sides. In the research context we validate state-of-the art technologies promoted by web leaders such as Google AngularJS, Facebook ReactJS and many others such as Netflix, Wallmart, or the Linux foundation for node.js. The Web environment raises many big issues since all equipments are basically connected to the Internet and the balance between end-user equipment cost and processing power is still a work in progress. Our main research track in such context is to find proper software toolkits hiding Web complexity. We mainly focus on time jitter, cornerstone of Web development, since it implies both end-user and network TCP indecisions. Due to this jitter combination the Web programming model has mutated toward the promises paradigm. It is a complex event based development model provided without external API help. It handles future execution whether successful or not, in a time jittered context. AngularJS, ReactJS, CoffeeScript, NodeJS, MongoDB, ElasticSearch are all time jitter compliant technologies designed for the Web constrains and revolutionising the way we build intermediation platforms.

C3PO explores network transport laziness with the use of a DTN that imposes a larger jitter than classical TCP/UDP. We build a JavaScript mockup [5] that uses a Java based DTN that stores, carries and forwards message from source to destination. C3PO is a software framework extending AngularJS through plugins, without central server, even during deployment phases. We use the dynamic nature of JavaScript to build application on the fly from network messages containing the application description. Our C3PO architecture enables us to build ephemeral and spontaneous social network, on demand and in a matter of days.

Our joint work with Worldline explores the promises paradigm model to enable automation extraction of independent micro-service. These micro-services called fluxion [9] , from the contraction of flow and functions, may be dynamically and transparently moved over a cluster of servers. Our novelty resides in the fact that the original code is not redesigned for the cluster architecture. Fluxion are extracted from the initial code, and an equivalence is maintained between the initially promissified code and the fluxionized one. Code has two facets, a promise one, used to express software services and a fluxion one, used to express software bottlenecks.

Eventually our work with Jumplyn explores complex centralised social network. We want to design a software system to later support our technical research hot topics. The target theme is a software platform that helps students handle their projects. University depends more and more on external resources to teach students. Theses resources are both known by students and their teachers, and the pace and range of explored technologies leads to difficulties in teaching state-of-the-art subjects. The more dedicated a professor needs to be in his research activity, the more broad knowledge he has to teach. For instance 20 years ago one could cope software development teaching with one or two programming languages. Nowadays, a single code involves more then four programming languages to be fully understood. This technology spreading issue stands still in many teaching domains, since past technologies are still actives and future one are promising. We build Jumplyn to cope with this unbalanced game. To help student improving their project and avoid working with obsolete technologies, and to help teacher face the universal and inexpensive availability of knowledge. Jumplyn is a complex JavaScript development stack that collects resources for improving student work and providing services to help them from day to day activities. The current stack integrates the following technologies : MaterialDesign, AngularJS, CoffeeScript, NodeJs, MongoDb, ElasticSearch. Managing and developing software service above this stack is a complex research issue for a small sized development team. We do not have any publication on Jumplyn since our first goal is to build a support intermediation platform to study classical issues such as recommendation or web crawling, scraping and indexation with our own sources of raw data.