A Scalable Application Architecture for composing News Portals on the Internet

1. A Scalable Application Architecture for composing News Portals on the Internet Serpil TOK, Zeki BAYRAM. Eastern MediterraneanUniversity Famagusta Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

2. Overview • Using WEB services to provide content for news portals • Tool for uploading content to each WEB service independently • Web Application (News Portal) that queries Web Services based upon the user’s preferences and presents customized content • Implemented in Microsoft .NET framework • Not a new idea in itself, rather an application of existing technology to a real-world situation • If developed further, could be the basis of customizable news portals

3. XML Web Services • A kind of remote procedure call • Allows the composition of applications from components that are physically in different locations on the Internet • Generally use SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) for communication with clients. Others are HTTP GET and HTTP POST • Extends distributed computing to a broad range of client applications. • With proper tools, very easy to design and use.

4. Components of the project • A News Portal Site, implemented as an Asp.Net Web application • A Windows Application for reporters, used to upload content to a Web service • XML Web Services which expose news content to portals through a well-specified interface • DBMS ( Ms SQL Server 2000) to store news content

5. Newsportal WebSite (.aspx) XML Web Service(.asmx) XML Web Service(.asmx) Internet User Database1 Database 2 Reporter provides news Reporter provides news Windows Application for Reporter(.cs) Windows Application for Reporter(.cs) The Architecture of the Project

6. Uploading news to a news Web Service Using the Windows application, each reporter can • Compose and edit a news item • Upload his news item to his dedicated database • Manipulate the contents of his database, for example, see a listing of articles, remove articles, modify articles Rudimentary tool, designed as a proof of concept

7. Screen-shot of the Windows application

8. The NewsPortal Web Application • This is the “front end” for end consumers of the news provided by reporters • The idea is that many others with different user interfaces but using the same data sources will be made available to users. • Customized content • In the sample portal, • A user can see the most recent news of reporters covered by the portal, • A user can search for articles in the site • By reporter name, • By category, • By a date, • By a Date Interval, • By a keyword or sentence in subject, • Or , a user can see all reporters’ articles without any restrictions,

9. Screen-shot of the Entry page of the News Portal

10. Main Search Form of the Sample Portal

11. Web Services Provided

12. Description of the Web Service functions • Takenews( )WebMethod:Returns the most recent articles by the authors. • Takereport( string no, string fname)WebMethod: This function takes two parameters: an article ID (“no”), and an author name (“fname”). It returns the article belonging to the author, and which has the specified ID (used mainly for testing purposes) • Takesearch (string q)WebMethod:This is the most general of the Web methods: it takes a query string (whose format should naturally be known to the calling program) containing complex search criteria, and returns all articles satisfying the criteria. In a production version of the application, this would be left out! (to be replaced by more specific Web methods)

13. Microsoft .NET Framework • An advanced multi-language platform for software development • Huge library consisting of thousands of classes • Visual tools for integrated program development and testing (Visual Studio.NET) • Support for desktop applications (Windows Forms), Web applications (Web forms, ASP.NET), Database access (ADO.NET), XML Web Services

14. Web Forms and ASP.NET • Used for the server-side part of a WEB application • Develop WEB applications as if developing desktop application • UI components placed on a form, and event handlers written for components • Components translated into HTML components automatically • Some functionality delegated to the client side through the automatic generation of scripting code to be executed on the browser (validity checking of input etc.)

15. Web Forms and ASP.NET • The transfer of the page to a remote browser not too important from a programming point of view • Separation of the user interface and the logic of the application (the so-called “code behind” approach) • Compiled .Net-based environment

16. Web Services using the .NET framework • Web service defined by extending a class available in the .Net framework • Using web services involves adding a Web reference to your project, which automatically creates a local “proxy class” for the service. Any interaction with the Web service goes through the methods of the proxy class

17. Future Work • More comprehensive Web services (larger assortment of functions) • Subscription mechanism for Web services (only those portals who subscribe to be allowed to obtain their revices)

18. Conclusion • We presented a prototype application that uses Web services and a multi-layered architecture to supply content for news portals • Our architecture is extendible (just add more Web services) and leads to easy building of customized content for end-users • We briefly described the advantages of using an advanced programming platform for implementing a project such as this