The State of the Art in Language Workbenches. Conclusions from the Language Workbench Challenge

Language workbenches are tools that provide high-level mechanisms for the implementation of (domain-specific) languages. Language workbenches are an active area of research that also receives many contributions from industry. To compare and discuss existing language workbenches, the annual Language Workbench Challenge was launched in 2011. Each year, participants are challenged to realize a given domain-specific language with their workbenches as a basis for discussion and comparison. In this paper, we describe the state of the art of language workbenches as observed in the previous editions of the Language Workbench Challenge. In particular, we capture the design space of language workbenches in a feature model and show where in this design space the participants of the 2013 Language Workbench Challenge reside. We compare these workbenches based on a DSL for questionnaires that was realized in all workbenches

Implementing a Mobile Application for Street Lighting Evaluation

Nowadays, energy consumption is on the rise. This is not sustainable in the long run. The highest energy use in Town Councils takes place in street lighting installations. In order to help in this problem, we present a mobile service to evaluate the electrical consumption of these infrastructures. This new tool is able to make an estimation of energy demand of installations; on an easy and intuitive way thanks to an evaluation methodology which reduces the need of a large list of parameters used by other programs. As a result, the developed application also gives users the opportunity to compare the efficiency of the installation evaluated with others previously evaluated to increase energy efficiency. The application was tested with two different experiments to ensure its correct running and to evaluate both the estimation accuracy and usability

Eating Your Own Dog Food: WebDSL Case Studies to Improve Academic Workflows

SDF, Stratego and Spoofax provide a platform for development of domain-specific programming languages. On this platform, the WebDSL project started out as a case study in language engineering, and grew into a reliable tool for rapid prototyping and continuous development of web applications. Our team led by Eelco Visser develops and operates several web applications to support academic workflows. EvaTool governs the process of course quality control, importing questionnaire data, and providing lecturers and education directors with a platform to discuss and agree on improvements. WebLab is an online learning management system with a focus on programming education, with support for lab work and digital exams, used by over 40 courses. Conf Researchr is a domain-specific content management system for creating and hosting integrated websites for conferences with multiple co-located events, used by all ACM SIGPLAN and SIGSOFT conferences. MyStudyPlanning is an application for composition of individual study programs by students and verification of those programs by the exam board, used by multiple faculties at the Delft University of Technology. These tools served as practical case studies for applying the research, and ensure the continued development of the underlying platform

Estimation of Energy Consumption in Street Lighting using Mobile Devices

The growing energy consumption is not sustainable in the long run. Taking into account that street lighting is one of the highest energy consumers in cities, this paper aims to develop a methodology to estimate the energy consumption of these installations with as few input variables as possible. In addition, the paper presents a mobile application developed to help lighting managers not only on the energy consumption evaluation, but suggesting the possible improvements on current systems which can save energy in case that they are implemented

Stateful Entities: Object-oriented Cloud Applications as Distributed Dataflows

Programming stateful cloud applications remains a very painful experience. Instead of focusing on the business logic, programmers spend most of their time dealing with distributed systems considerations, with the most important being consistency, load balancing, failure management, recovery, and scalability. At the same time, we witness an unprecedented adoption of modern dataflow systems such as Apache Flink, Google Dataflow, and Timely Dataflow. These systems are now performant and fault-tolerant, and they offer excellent state management primitives. With this line of work, we aim at investigating the opportunities and limits of compiling general-purpose programs into stateful dataflows. Given a set of easy-to-follow code conventions, programmers can author stateful entities, a programming abstraction embedded in Python. We present a compiler pipeline named StateFlow, to analyze the abstract syntax tree of a Python application and rewrite it into an intermediate representation based on stateful dataflow graphs. StateFlow compiles that intermediate representation to a target execution system: Apache Flink and Beam, AWS Lambda, Flink's Statefun, and Cloudburst. Through an experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that the code generated by StateFlow incurs minimal overhead. While developing and deploying our prototype, we came to observe important limitations of current dataflow systems in executing cloud applications at scale

ユーザー開発や保守が可能なWebアプリケーションフレームワークの開発

データベース連動のWeb アプリケーション向けのフレームワーク「INTER-Mediator」では，宣言的な記述で開発を進められる．手続き的なプログラミングに比べて，学習コストが低下し，その結果，業務システムのエンドユーザーなど，現場でシステムを利用する立場のユーザーが開発の一部や保守作業をできるようになる．初期開発と同程度の費用がかかるとされる業務システムの保守開発をユーザーが行うことでコスト削減が可能となり，システムの継続的進化をより低いコストで実現する．本論文では，フレームワークを利用した開発方法や実装手法を説明し，保守作業を宣言的な記述の範囲で行えることを示す．さらに，開発手法の学習がエンジニアリングの専門家でなくても可能なことを，被験者実験を通じて検証する．電気通信大学201