Concept an terminology

Concept

Concept#

The process of application instrumentation is executed on the user’s device and is completely hidden from the operator of the application. Further, to enable application instrumentation the operator’s support or allowance is from a technical point of view not required.

The concept of application instrumentation differentiates between the runtime environment the process gets applied to.

Terminology

Terminology#

Communication Process (CP)

Any data stream which gets routed towards

• the backend (outgoing) delegating a request to remote compute resources capable of handling the workload. The resources are integrated within a dedicated infrastructure which executes the workload through proprietary applications logic and
• the application (incoming) response representing the results of a completed compute operation which was executed in the backend.

Preparation Process (PP)

The results received from the communication process are mapped to an application state. In general, the application state gets differentiates between

• the internal application state necessary to decide about the application runtime behavior and
• the data model generated from the incoming data stream.

Render Process (RP)

The data model objects are forwarded to the render process to generate a visual representation. The user interface components generated from those data objects provide interaction capabilities that enable the user to engage with the data model.

5.3.2 Concept of version 1

5.3.2 Concept of version 1#

The following composition of application-related components summarizes the level at which the application instrumentation process gets applied.

Render engine – DOM

Render engine – DOM#

The render engine of an arbitrary web-based application and the user interface component set introduced through Project Millipedes browser-extension is identical. Both variants utilize the same Document Object Model (DOM) available within the web-browser designated in the above summary through the term Shared Render Process (SRP). The browser-extension has access to the visualization instrument of any web-based application. The access to this context is crucial to apply measures.

• to analyze any content element rendered through the target application and
• to inject a target application-independent security context through a set of custom user interface components at the appropriate position.

Reference to the use case

Reference to the use case#

At this point, we have to reference the use case we intend to enable through application instrumentation. Within a web-based application implementing a social-network, the chronological gap between time coordinates of public and private content elements represent the previously mentioned appropriate position.

In the following sections, a short description is provided highlighting some internals of the analysis process to enable a reusable concept of application instrumentation of web-based applications. We describe the objectives at a high abstraction level to allow the average reader to understand the relevance.

5.4.2 Concept of version 2

5.4.2 Concept of version 2#

The following composition of application-related components summarizes the level at which the application instrumentation process gets applied.

5.4.3 Rendering layer - Overview

5.4.3 Rendering layer - Overview#

The render engine of an arbitrary native application (target application) and the render engine Project Millipedes introduces to visualize a custom set of user interface components differentiate. Depending on the application requirements or the preferences of the software engineer the representation concept distinguishes among web-, hybrid- and native-based rendering techniques.

Each one of those rendering techniques exhibits a certain number of different implementations, those created and promoted by large operation system vendors and others created from smaller or independent entities.

Due to the extraordinary variety of rendering implementations available applications are implemented with, it is not a realistic strategy to adapt or re-implement the user interface component set in any rendering implementation.

Instead, we are introducing a new rendering layer which cooperates with an arbitrary render engine used in the target application.