Characterization and Evaluation of Collaborative Web Applications


Downloads:        WeBWorK            SimpleSpreadsheet             Photosharing Application

Publications        Support


Overview


Near the turn of the century, Internet services shifted from delivering only static content to interactive dynamic content.  Nowadays, another shift is underway.  An increasingly popular class of web applications, called collaborative web applications, primarily rely on end users to create content.  Such user-supplied content can be static (e.g., Youtube videos) or dynamic (e.g., Facebook applications).  The goal of this work is to characterize server side demands of these new Web 2.0 workloads.

Project members: Christopher Stewart, Matthew Leventi, and Kai Shen.


Downloads

"For better or worse, benchmarks shape a field." --- David Patterson

To validate our research, we experiment with several collaborative web applications deployed on our local cluster.  The applications are available for download below.  Feel free to use them to further your own research agenda.

WeBWorK


WeBWorK delivers individualized homework problems over the web. Specifically, teachers supply server-side scripts that create dynamic homework problems for their students to solve.  WeBWorK is deployed at over more than 70 institutions worldwide and serves more than 50,000 students.  To use WeBWorK as a homework checker in the classroom, visit the new wiki.

On this site, we distribute the moodle-integrated version of WeBWorK currently deployed at the University of Rochester, complete with the real working dataset (i.e., the real questions supplied by teachers).  We also supply a trace of student access patterns to WeBWorK questions.  Combined these components allow us to replay WeBWorK requests on our local cluster in a very realistic fashion.  

Warning:  WeBWorK is a real application that requires many interacting components (all of which fortunately are free).  Successful deployment can take a lot of trial and error.  Additional help for installation can be found at the wiki above and at the moodle-integration homepage.


WeBWorK Quick Install for 32-bit Linux-based systems:


All packages installed in a portable directory:  WeBWorK-quickinstall.tar.gz

Full installation procedure:


1.  Instructions to install the pre-requisite applications and libraries: PDF  Text (w/ color)  Text

2.  WeBWork components: WeBWorK-application.tar.gz

WeBWorK itself consists of two components.  The WeBWorK question server executes teacher supplied questions and formats them for presentation using latex and dvipng.  WeBWorK question type for moodle provides an interface between the question server and the popular Moodle course management system.  We also distribute a real world WeBWorK dataset for realistic evaluation.

3. WeBWorK workload generator: WeBWorK-trace.tar.gz

The workload generator reissues a real trace of WeBWorK requests observed at the University of Rochester deployment.

SimpleSpreadsheet


Coming soon.

Photosharing


Coming soon.


Publications:


Empirical Examination of A Collaborative Web Application, Christopher Stewart, Matthew Leventi, and Kai Shen, To appear IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (Special Session on Benchmark Innovation), Seattle, WA, September 2008.


Support:

Support: A portion of this project is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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