Multilingualism, Lingua Franca or What?

For this 10th anniversary issue we are very fortunate to have two extremely engaging conversations. They are both frank discussions on the state of the art of translation and its relevance today. We open with Henry Liu, recently President of the International Federation of Translators and close with a conversation between renowned scholars Susan Bassnett and Anthony Pym, who muse - over a glass or two - about the monster that is called ‘translation’

BAM framework for OMS using open source technologies

No início da década de 90, as empresas começaram a sentir a necessidade de melhorar o acesso à informação das suas actividades para auxiliar na tomada de decisões. Desta forma, no mundo da informática, emergiu o sector Business Intelligence (BI) composto inicialmente por data warehousing e ferramentas de geração de relatórios. Ao longo dos anos o conceito de BI evoluiu de acordo com as necessidades empresariais, tornando a análise das actividades e do desempenho das organizações em aspectos críticos na gestão das mesmas. A área de BI abrange diversos sectores, sendo o de geração de relatórios e o de análise de dados aqueles que melhor preenchem os requisitos pretendidos no controlo de acesso à informação do negócio e respectivos processos. Actualmente o tempo e a informação são vantagens competitivas e por esse mesmo motivo as empresas estão cada vez mais preocupadas com o facto de o aumento do volume de informação estar a tornar-se insustentável na medida que o tempo necessário para processar a informação é cada vez maior. Por esta razão muitas empresas de software, tais como Microsoft, IBM e Oracle estão numa luta por um lugar neste mercado de BI em expansão. Para que as empresas possam ser competitivas, a sua capacidade de previsão e resposta às necessidades de mercado em tempo real é requisito principal, em detrimento da existência apenas de uma reacção a uma necessidade que peca por tardia. Os produtos de BI têm fama de trabalharem apenas com dados históricos armazenados, o que faz com que as empresas não se possam basear nessas soluções quando o requisito de alguns negócios é de tempo quase real. A latência introduzida por um data warehouse é demasiada para que o desempenho seja aceitável. Desta forma, surge a tecnologia Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) que fornece análise de dados e alertas em tempo quase real sobre os processos do negócio, utilizando fontes de dados como Web Services, filas de mensagens, etc. O conceito de BAM surgiu em Julho de 2001 pela organização Gartner, sendo uma extensão orientada a eventos da área de BI. O BAM define-se pelo acesso em tempo real aos indicadores de desempenho de negócios com o intuito de aumentar a velocidade e eficácia dos processos de negócio. As soluções BAM estão a tornar-se cada vez mais comuns e sofisticadas

A web application user interface specification language based on statecharts

The Internet today has a phenomenal reach---right into the homes of a vast audience worldwide. Some organisations (and individuals) see this medium as a good opportunity for extending the reach of their computer systems. One popular approach used for such endeavours is to run an application on a server, using web technology for displaying its user interface (UI) remotely. Developing such a web-based UI can be quite tedious---it is a concurrent, distributed program which has to run in a hostile environment. Furthermore, the platform on which it is implemented (the web) was not originally intended for such usage. A web framework is a collection of software components which provides its users with support for developing and executing web-based UIs. In part, web frameworks can be seen as being analogous to interpreters: given a specification of a UI using a specification technique dictated by the framework, server components of the framework can present the UI using web technology. Topics related to web frameworks are scarce in the academic literature, but abound in industry and open discussion forums. Similarly, the designers of web frameworks seldom found their work on existing theory in the literature. This study is an attempt to bridge this gap. It is focused on two aspects of web frameworks: the specification technique a framework mandates, and how such a specification can subsequently be used to present a UI via web technology. As part of this study, a survey was conducted of 80 open source web frameworks. Based on the survey, a partial overview of the domain of web frameworks is given, covering what is seen as being typically required of a web framework and covering specification techniques that are used by existing frameworks. Two taxonomies are proposed of the strategies web frameworks use for specifying two aspects of web UIs. Using the web as platform implies adherence to certain (intended) architectural constraints. Web framework designers often strain against these constraints. However, another point of view is to recognise that the success of the web platform is made possible precisely because of its intended architecture. (And the success of the web is surely the principal motivation for using it for remote UIs in the first place.) With the bias of this viewpoint, a specification technique is proposed for web-based UIs. This technique is based on the well-known formalism of statecharts, with semantics explicitly defined in terms of the intended architectural components and constraints of the web. The design of a web framework for presenting a UI so specified is also proposed (based on the theoretical background given, as well as two prototype implementations which have been developed).Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2007.Computer Scienceunrestricte

Produktiivsema Java EE ökosüsteemi poole

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsioone.Alates Java programmeerimiskeele loomisest 1995. a. on selle üks kõige olulisemaid kasutusvaldkondi veebirakenduste programmeerimine. Java populaarsuse põhjuseks ei olnud ainult keeledisainilised omadused nagu objektorienteeritus ja range tüübisüsteem, vaid ennekõike platvormist sõltumatus ja standardiseeritud teekide rohkus, mis tegi tavaprogrammeerijatele veebirakenduste programmeerimise jõukohaseks. Kümme aastat hiljem oli olukord muutunud märkimisväärselt. Java oli kaotamas oma liidripositsiooni uutele, nn. dünaamilistele keeltele nagu PHP, Ruby ja Python. Seejuures polnud põhjuseks mitte see, et need keeled ise oleksid tunduvalt Javast paremad, vaid Java ökosüsteemi areng oli väga konservatiivne ja aeglane. Antud kontekstis alustasime aastal 2005 oma uuringuid eesmärgiga parandada suurimad probleemid Java ökosüsteemis ja viia see vähemalt samale tasemele ülalmainitud keeltega. Käesaolevas dissertatsioonis on esitatud vastavate uuringute tulemused. Dissertatsioon põhineb neljal publikatsioonil—kolmel eelretsenseeritud teadusartiklil ja ühel patendil. Esimeseks katseks oli uue veebiraamistike integreerimisraamistiku “Aranea” loomine. Antud hetkel oli Javas üle kolmekümne aktiivselt arendatavat veebiraamistikku, mistõttu otsustasime fokuseeruda kahele võtmeprobleemile: raamistike taaskasutatavuse lihtsus ja koostöövõime. Selleks töötasime välja uudse komponentmudeli, mis võimaldab kirjeldada süsteemi teenus- ja kasutajaliideskomponentide hierarhilisi seoseid, ja realiseerisime eri raamistike adapterid komponentmudelisse sobitumiseks. Järgmise probleemina käsitlesime andmete haldamiskihi kirjeldamist. Lähtusime eeldusest, et relatsioonilistes andmebaasides on SQL kõige enamlevinud andmete kirjelduskeel, ja efektiivne admehalduskiht peab võimaldama Javas lihtsasti esitada SQL päringuid, samas garanteerima konstrueeritavate päringute süntaktilise korrektsuse. Senised lahendused baseerusid reeglina SQL päringute programsel konstrueerimisel sõnedena, mistõttu päringute korrektsuse kontroll oli raskendatud. Lahenduseks töötasime välja nn. rakendispetsiifilise keele (i.k. domain-specific language, DSL) SQL päringute esitamiseks kasutades Java keele tüübisüsteemi vahendeid nende korrektsuse kompileerimisaegseks valideerimiseks. Töö käigus identifitseerisime üldised tarkvara disainimustrid, mis lihtsustavad analoogiliste tüübikindlate DSLide loomist, ja kasutasime neid kahe uue eksperimentaalse tüübikindla DSLi loomisel - Java klasside täitmisaegseks loomiseks ja manipuleerimiseks ning XMLi parsimiseks ja genereerimiseks. Kolmanda ülesandena pühendusime ühele olulisemale Java platvormi puudusele võrreldes dünaamiliste keeltega. Kui PHP’s või Ruby’s saab programmi koodi otseselt muuta ja tulemust koheselt näha, siis Java rakendusserverid nõuavad rakenduse “ehitamist” (i.k. build) ja “paigutamist” (i.k. deploy), mis suurte rakenduste korral võib võtta mitmeid või isegi kümneid minuteid. Probleemi lahenduseks töötasime välja uudse ja praktilise meetodi koodi ümberlaadimiseks Java platvormil, mille põhjal arendasime ja lasime välja toote “JRebel”. See kasutab Java baitkoodi laadimisaegset modifitseerimist koos spetsiaalse ümbersuunamiskihiga kutsekohtade, meetodite ja meetodikeha vahel, mis võimaldab hallata koodi erinevaid versioone ning täitmisajal suunata väljakutsed viimasele versioonile. Täna, rohkem kui seitse aastat pärast uuringute algust, tuleb tõdeda, et meie töö veebiraamistikega lõi küll eduka platvormi erinevate eksperimentaalsete ideede uurimiseks ja katsetamiseks, kuid reaalses tarkvaratööstuses ei ole leidnud laialdast kasutust. Töö tüübikindlate DSLidega oli edukam, sest see mõjutas otseselt edaspidiseid uuringuid antud teemal ning selle elemendid leidsid rakendust viimases JPA standardi spetsifikatsioonis. Kõige suurem mõju tarkvaratööstusele on meie dünaamiline koodiümberlaadimise lahendus, mis on tänapäeval Java kogukonnas laialdaselt kasutusel ning mida kasutavad igapäevaselt rohkem kui 3000 erinevat organisatsiooni üle maailma.Since the Tim Berners-Lee famous proposal of World Wide Web in 1990 and the introduction of the Common Gateway Interface in 1993, the world of online web applications has been booming. In the nineties the Java language and platform became the first choice for web development in and out of the enterprise. But by the mid-aughts the platform was in crisis - newcomers like PHP, Ruby and Python have picked up the flag as the most productive platforms, with Java left for conservative enterprises. However, this was not because those languages and platforms were significantly better than Java. Rather, the issue was that innovation in the Java ecosystem was slow, due to the ways the platform was managed. Large vendors dominated the space, committees designed standards and the brightest minds were moving to other JVM languages like Scala, Groovy or JRuby. In this context we started our investigations in 2005. Our goals were to address some of the more gaping holes in the Java ecosystem and bring it on par with the languages touted as more productive. The first effort was to design a better web framework, called “Aranea”. At that point of time Java had more than thirty actively developed web frameworks, and many of them were used simultaneously in the same projects. We decided to focus on two key issues: ease of reuse and framework interoperability. To solve the first issue we created a self-contained component model that allowed the construction of both simple and sophisticated systems using a simple object protocol and hierarchical aggregation in style of the Composite design pattern. This allowed one to capture every aspect of reuse in a dedicated component, be it a part of framework functionality, a repeating UI component or a whole UI process backed by complex logic. Those could be mixed and matched almost indiscriminately subject to rules expressed in the interfaces they implemented. To solve the second issue we proposed adapters between the component model and the various models of other frameworks. We later implemented some of those adapters both in a local and remote fashion, allowing one to almost effortlessly capture and mix different web application components together, no matter what the underlying implementation may be. The next issue that we focused on was the data access layer. At that point in the Java community the most popular ways of accessing data was either using embedded SQL strings or an Object-Relational Mapping tool ``Hibernate''. Both approaches had severe disadvantages. Using embedded SQL strings exposed the developers to typographical errors, lack of abstraction, very late validation and dangers of dynamic string concatenation. Using Hibernate/ORM introduced a layer of abstraction notorious for the level of misunderstanding and production performance issues it caused. We believed that SQL is the right way to access the data in a relational database, as it expresses exactly the data that is needed without much overhead. Instead of embedding it into strings, we decided to embed it using the constructs of the Java language, thus creating an embedded DSL. As one of the goals was to provide extensive compiler-time validation, we made extensive use of Java Generics and code generation to provide maximum possible static safety. We also built some basic SQL extensions into the language that provided a better interface between Java structures and relational queries as well as allowing effortless further extension and enabling ease of abstraction. Our work on the SQL DSL made us believe that building type safe embedded DSLs could be of great use for the Java community. We embarked on building two more experimental DSLs, one for generating and manipulating Java classes on-the-fly and the other for parsing and generating XML. These experiments exposed some common patterns, including restricting DSL syntax, collecting type safe history and using type safe metadata. Applying those patterns to different domains helps encode a truly type safe DSL in the Java language. Our final and largest effort concentrated on a major disadvantage of the Java platform as compared to the dynamically-typed language platforms. Namely, while in PHP or Ruby on Rails one could edit any line of code and see the result immediately, the Java application servers would force one to do “build” and “deploy”, which for larger applications could take minutes and even tens of minutes. Initial investigation revealed that the claims of fast code reloading were not quite solid across the board. Dynamically-typed languages would typically destroy state and recreate the application, just like the Java application servers. The crucial difference was that they did it quickly and the productivity of development was a large concern for language and framework designers. However as we investigated the issue deeper on the Java side, we came up with a novel and practical way of reloading code on the JVM, which we developed and released as the product “JRebel”. We made use of the fact that Java bytecode is a very high level encoding of the Java language, which is easy to modify during load time. This allowed us to insert a layer of indirection between the call sites, methods and method bodies which was versatile enough to manage multiple versions of code and redirect the calls to the latest version during runtime. There have been over the years some basic developments in the similar fashion, but unlike them we engineered JRebel to run on the stock JVM and to have no visible impact on application functional or non-functional behaviour. The latter was the hardest, as the layer of indirection both introduces numerous compatibility problems and adds performance overhead. To overcome those limitations we had to integrate deeply on many levels of the JVM and to use compiler techniques to remove the layer of indirection where possible

Towards Understanding Modern Multi-Language Software Systems

RÉSUMÉ : Aujourd’hui, la plupart des applications et sites Web tels que Google et Facebook sont des systèmes multi-langages. Google est codé en C, C++, Go, Java, Python et JS. Facebook, quant à lui, utilise Hack, PHP, Python, C++, Java, Erlang, D, Haskell et JS. De plus, de précédentes études ont permis de constater que les développeurs PHP utilisaient régulièrement deux langages en plus du PHP. Les développeurs Java utilisent également le C/C++ avec du code Java à travers la Java Native Interface (JNI) qui permet d’appeler des fonctions natives à partir de méthodes Java et des méthodes Java à partir des fonctions natives. De plus, les développeurs d’applications Android préfèrent utiliser Android NDK (qui permet d’utiliser du code C/C++ avec Android) en plus de Java, plutôt que d’utiliser uniquement Java. Dans tous ces exemples, on observe le phénomène du développement multi-langage. Bien qu’il y ait, le plus souvent, un seul langage principal (Java ou C/C++) avec divers contributions dans d’autres langages (par exemple, bash ou make), les logiciels modernes sont de plus en plus hétérogènes dans le sens où ils combinent de multiples langages de programmation qui interagissent d’une façon significative avec le langage principal.----------ABSTRACT : Today, most popular applications and websites such as Google and Facebook are multilanguage systems. Google is developed with C, C++, Go, Java, Python, and JS, while Facebook is using Hack, PHP, Python, C++, Java, Erlang, D, Haskell, and JS. Furthermore, previous research studies reported that PHP developers regularly use two languages besides PHP. Java developers also use C/C++ with Java code through the Java native interface (JNI) that allows to call native functions from Java methods and Java methods from native functions. Moreover, Android application developers prefer to use the Android NDK (allows to use C/C++ code with Android) along with Java compared to using only Java. In all these examples, we observe the phenomenon of multi-language development. While in many cases, there is one clear main language (e.g., Java or C/C++) with various smaller contributions from other languages (e.g., bash or make), increasingly more modern software are heterogeneous in the sense that they are composed of multiple programming languages that interact with the host language to a large extent

A UI-driven approach to facilitating effective development of rich and composite web applications

It is well-recognized that the development of user interfaces is one of the most time-consuming tasks in the overall application development process. At the same time, there is an increasing demand for rich and fluid user interfaces from web users. As a result, developers are facing increasing challenges in delivering web applications, especially those with rich UI requirements. In this thesis we present two solutions to facilitate the execution and rapid development of web applications with rich user interfaces. The first solution is a rich internet application (RIA) framework aimed at providing high usability and productivity to web applications, while the second solution is a UI integration framework that simplifies web application development by facilitating the composition of reusable UI components. The foundation of our RIA framework is an XML-based high-level protocol for communicating asynchronous events and incremental UI updates on the web. The protocol facilitates rich and highly interactive UI, while at the same time eliminates frequent and slow page refreshes and provides a more responsive user experience. Built on top of the protocol, a server-side runtime allows UI logic code to be executed on the server side, while a set of server-side event-driven API enables developers to implement sophisticated application-specific UI behavior. On the client side, a thin client renders UI and processes native events, but leaves application-specific logic to the server side. The thin client thus allows end users to enjoy a rich UI experience in a safe client environment, without executing any downloaded code. The proposed UI integration framework includes an abstract UI component model which allows UI components to be programmatically manipulated via events, operations, and properties, essentially exposing UI as services. To facilitate component interactions, the framework offers an event-based composition model, which allows integration logic to be specified in the form of event listeners. Composite applications are executed via a lightweight runtime middleware, which provides component adapters that allow the middleware to communicate with native UI components implemented in a variety of languages and platforms. Finally, a graphical development environment allows composite applications to be built in a drag-and-drop fashion