Research Report on Impact of Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing Platform on Software Engineering

1. Introduction

The following research report is based on the selected article “Impact of Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing Platform on Software Engineering” by (Guha and Al-Dabass, 2010). This research report aims to analyse the impact of cloud computing and Web 2.0, particularly on software engineering. In this research report, cloud computing platforms and its implementations on IT infrastructure in the software industry will be studied. Further, this research report will study how the software industry is struggling with cloud computing considering the impacts and challenges of cloud computing on software engineering. Presently, Cloud Computing and Web 2.0 has immensely developed that has enabled new business models to adopt semantic web. Most of the businesses have leased out its computing platforms to Cloud Computing (CC). Because of its benefits, Cloud Computing has taken over the software development significantly. Lastly, this research report will discuss the difference between software engineers and cloud providers.

1. Discussion

With the developing IT infrastructure and semantic web, more business models have diverted its computing operations from software applications to cloud computing [1]. Semantic web such as Web 2.0 enables businesses to enjoy benefits of “Extensible Mark-up Language” (XML) that allows the data content to be read and processed by computers automatically. Other XML Web platforms like “Simple Object Access Protocol” (SOAP) and “Web Service Description Language” (WSDL) are capable of integrating computing platforms, operating systems and various programming languages that makes it much easier than the software [2]. Furthermore, CC and Web offer data exchange and data integration that can be accessed over the internet with geographically dispersed clients. Due to these web attributes and capabilities, most of the business models have adopted Cloud Computing and Web. 

This article defined cloud computing as the idea of outsourcing the server, storage, software tools and techniques over the internet. There are three types of cloud computing, that are used depending upon the data and resources that are stored and shared. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are the three types cloud computing that is commonly used by the businesses to store, retrieve and share the data and resources, and to avail programming and software services. As illustrated in Fig. 1, businesses decide from the three common clouds (private, public and hybrid) considering the amount of control it requires to secure or share with the tenants [3]. 

Cloud computing is an integrated “service-oriented architecture” (SOA) of hardware and software resources that are virtually interlinked to different applications in the different operating systems. Because of virtualisation, the resources and data can be shared and accessed by multiple users [4]. Fig. 2 represents the virtual infrastructure that allows greater on-demand scalability, and effective resource management. Consequently, it also enables cost cutting and greener IT movement.