Antonio Tapiador, Joaquín Salvachúa
Web development is currently driven by model-view-controller (MVC) frameworks. How has content management adapted to this scenario? This paper reviews content management features in Ruby on Rails framework and its most popular plug-ins. These features are distributed among the different layers of the MVC architecture.
Antonio Tapiador, Diego Carrera
Through social network sites (SNS) are between the most popular sites in the Web, there is not a formal study on their functional features. This paper introduces a comprehensive list of them. Then, it shows how these features are supported by top 16 social network platforms. Results show some universal features, such as comments support, public sharing of contents, system notifications and profile pages with avatars. A strong tendency in using external services for authentication and contact recognition has been found, which is quite significant in top SNS. Most popular content types include text, pictures and video. The home page is the site for publishing content and following activities, whilst profile pages mainly include owner's contacts and content lists.
Alicia Díez, Antonio Tapiador
Social network management interfaces should consider separation of contexts and tie strength. This paper shows the design process upon building the Social Cheesecake, an interface that addresses both issues. Paper and screen prototyping were used in the design process. Paper prototype interactions helped to explore the metaphors in the domain, while screen prototype consolidated the model. The prototype was finally built using HTML5 and Javascript.
Antonio Tapiador, Víctor Sánchez, Joaquín Salvachúa
Social network platforms are increasingly becoming identity providers and a media for showing multiple types of activity from third-party web sites. In this article, we analyze the services provided by seven of the most popular social network platforms. Results show OAuth emerging as the authentication and authorization protocol, giving support to three types of APIs, client-side or Javascript, server-side or representational state transfer (REST) and streaming. JSON is the most popular format, but there a considerable variety of resource types and a lack of representation standard, which makes harder for the third-party developer integrating with several services.
Antonio Tapiador, Diego Carrera, Joaquín Salvachúa
This paper explores the application of role-based access control to social networks, from the perspective of social network analysis. Each tie, composed of a relation, a sender and a receiver, involves the sender's assignation of the receiver to a role with permissions. The model is not constrained to system-defined relations and lets users define them unilaterally. It benefits of RBAC's advantages, such as policy neutrality, simplification of security administration and permissions on other roles. Tie-RBAC has been implemented in a core for building social network sites, Social Stream.