TY - JOUR N2 - In the age of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Web and the Internet have changed significantly the way applications are developed, deployed and used. One of recent trends is modern design of web-applications based on SOA. This process is based on the composition of existing web services into a single scenario from the point of view of a particular user or client. This allows IT companies to shorten the product-time to market process. On the other hand, it raises questions about the quality of the application, trade-offs between quality factors and attributes and measurements of these. Services are usually hosted and executed in an environment managed by its provider that assures the quality attributes such as availability or throughput. Therefore, in this paper an attempt has been made to perform quality measurements towards the creation of efficient, dependable and user-oriented Web applications. First, the process of designing service-based applications is described. Next, metrics for subsequent measurements of efficiency, dependability and usability of distributed applications are presented. These metrics will assess the efforts and trade-offs in a Web-based application development. As examples, we describe a pair of multimedia applications which we have developed in our department and executed in a cluster-based environment. One of them runs in the BeesyCluster middleware and the second one in the Kaskada platform. For these applications we present results of measurements and conclude about relations between quality attributes in the presented application development model. This knowledge can be used to reason about such relations for new similar applications and be used in rapid and quality development of the latter. L1 - http://www.journals.pan.pl/Content/89886/PDF/Journal10178-VolumeXIX%20Issue2_01paper.pdf L2 - http://www.journals.pan.pl/Content/89886 PY - 2012 IS - No 2 EP - 190 DO - 10.2478/v10178-012-0016-9 KW - quality measurements KW - software quality KW - quality model and measures KW - parallel computing KW - distributed middleware KW - multimedia applications A1 - Czarnul, Paweł A1 - Dziubich, Tomasz A1 - Krawczyk, Hanna PB - Polish Academy of Sciences Committee on Metrology and Scientific Instrumentation DA - 2012 T1 - Evaluation of Multimedia Applications in a Cluster-Oriented Environment SP - 177 UR - http://www.journals.pan.pl/dlibra/publication/edition/89886 T2 - Metrology and Measurement Systems ER -