Surveying navigation modelling approaches

Recently, a number of authors who work on web application modelling have paid attention to the ideas regarding separation of concerns that underlie aspect-orientation, as well as some ideas that come from the model-driven development community. They attempt to improve the representation and separation of some concerns such as customisation or navigational concerns that are scattered throughout different software artifacts and tangled with other concerns in order to give a best support to the evolution of web applications. This paper surveys recent proposals in this field and compares them within a homogeneous framework that bridges the gap between the many different terminologies used, and highlights open problems that need further research.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2007-64119Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN-2007-67843-C06-0

Visión General de la Programación Orientada a Aspectos

La ingeniería del software, y en general, la informática es una disciplina que está en constante evolución. Cada día surgen nuevas técnicas y metodologías que intentan mejorar la calidad y la eficiencia de los productos software. En los últimos tiempos ha surgido con fuerza una nueva forma de descomponer los sistemas: la orientación a aspectos. Este informe trata dar una visión general de la programación orientada a aspectos, desde sus comienzos, hasta llegar su estado actual. Se sentarán las bases sobre las que se apoya está tecnología, y se definirán los conceptos que maneja, sirviendo de presentación a los investigadores que quieran introducirse en este campo

Separating the navigational aspect

The first step given to separate concepts in web environments has been to take apart presentation from data. This split has been gotten due to the appearance of the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) and the application of style sheets. The new ideas from the advanced separation of concerns community and the new abstractions like aspects make us think this original division isn’t rich enough. There are important concepts of Internet applications that should be defined separately. If we look at new web design methodologies, we can realize that one of these aspects is navigation. Following the way started by XML, we propose the use of the XML Linking Language (XLink) as a first stage to obtain the separation of the navigational aspect

Analysing the navigational aspect

The Internet and web applications have increased their popularity in the last few years. This boom has provoked the use of new approaches for web-based applications. These new methodologies try to address some new concerns which have appeared in this field and weren’t in traditional methodologies. One of these concerns is navigation. At the same time, it has been proved that there are some concerns that aren’t well treated with the traditional abstraction mechanisms ((functions, objects). They scatter by all the code of the program. This paper tries to join both approaches, crossing the gap between the design level proposed in the methodologies and the implementation level, using for it the proposed ideas in the area of the advanced separation of concerns

Using Aspect-orientation Techniques to Improve Reuse of Metamodels

Metamodelling is an activity that attracts attention of the research community dealing with the Model- Driven Development (MDD). To be reusable in different MDD approaches a metamodel should be unaware of being extended by another metamodel. This property of metamodel is called obliviousness. This paper shows that current techniques implementing metamodels do not maintain obliviousness when some elements of the extended metamodel and the elements of the original model have association relations. Three different approaches to reuse of metamodels are analyzed. One of the approaches uses traditional object-oriented techniques. Two other approaches use aspect-oriented techniques. The paper shows that the third approach, which considers relationships as first-class citizens at the implementation level by using relationship aspects, guarantees obliviousness of metamodels.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC 2003-369

Sitemaps from a model driven perspective: A first step for bridging the gap between information architecture and navigation design

Researchers claim that there is a disconnection between information architecture and navigation design. One way of approaching these two fields is to share deliverables. However, it is difficult to change the minds of audiences to make them use deliverables they are not used to. Thus, we propose let audiences use those deliverables they are more comfortable with, and then transform one deliverable into another, as far as possible. To get this aim, firstly, we need to have a deep knowledge of deliverables, and secondly, a set of mappings have to be defined in order to translate the information the source deliverable is covering into the target deliverable. Our approach uses metamodelling as the technique to define the pieces that compose deliverables and their relationships, and model transformations for mapping deliverables. In this context, the paper focuses on one of the most widely used information architecture deliverables, sitemaps, and its main contributions are: (1) a sitemap metamodel, which define the minimum set of elements that can be used for specifying sitemaps; and, (2) a set of model to model transformations to obtain a XHTML skeleton of structural and utility navigationMinisterio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN-2007-67843-C06-03Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2007-6411

Smart Contract Languages: A Multivocal Mapping Study

Blockchain is a disruptive technology that has attracted the attention of the scientific community and compa nies, as proven by the exponential growth of publications on this topic in recent years. This growing interest is mainly due to the promise that the use of blockchain enables it to be verified, without including any trusted intermediaries, that the information received from the network is authentic and up-to-date. In this respect, blockchain is a distributed database that can be seen as a ledger that records all transactions that have ever been executed. In this context, smart contracts are pieces of software used to facilitate, verify, and enforce the negotiation of a transaction on a blockchain platform. These pieces of software are implemented by using programming languages, which are sometimes provided by the blockchain platforms themselves. This study aims to (1) identify and categorise the state-of-the-art related to smart contract languages, in terms of the existing languages and their main features, and (2) identify new research opportunities. The review has been conducted as a multivocal mapping study that followsthe guidelines proposed by Garousi et al. for conducting multivocal literature reviews, as well as the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham and Charters for conducting mapping studies. As a result of the implementation of the review protocol, 4,119 papers were gathered, and 109 of them were selected for extraction. The contributions of this article are twofold: (1) 101 different smart contract languages have been identified and classified according to a variety of criteria; (2) a discussion on the findings and their implications for future research have been outlined. As a conclusion, it could be stated that a rigorous and replicable overview of the state-of-the-art of smart contract languages has been provided that can benefit not only researchers but also practitioners in the field, thanks to its multivocal nature.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología RTI2018-094283-B-C33 (ECLIPSE)Junta de Andalucía COPERNICA (P20-01224)Junta de Andalucía METAMORFOSIS (US-1381375

NIDO: Navegación e interacción con el usuario en el desarrollo de sistemas de información Web: Métodos, Técnicas y Herramientas TIC2003-00369

NIDO (Navegación e Interacción con el usuario en el Desarrollo de sistemas de Información Web: Métodos, Técnicas y Herramientas) is a research project with two main lines of research. The first one is to continue with the research developed in the coordinated projects MENHIR (TIC97-0593-C05-03) and DOLMEN (TIC2000-1673-C06-03), while the second one is related to the opening of new research lines in order to cover specific aspects associated with the specification and development of web systems. The rapide advance of the internet has made web systems become one of the main lines of work in companies which produce software, and also, an important research line in universities, research centres and companies’ research departments. Therefore, one of the main aims of our research project is to define a methodological environment suitable to deal with navigational characteristics and user’s interaction in web systems. This approach has to cover aspects of the whole life cycle, from requirements to implementation and testing. Navigation and user interface are critical aspects in web systems. In order to make easier the application of our work, a second important goal is to give support to our approaches with tools that allow this kind of applications to be automated. Besides, in our work the definition of references and metrics to measure the grade of quality of the results is also a fundamental objective. Finally, an important characteristic of our project is the work with companies and our big interest in applying our results to real projects

Model-Driven Engineering for Constraint Database Query Evaluation

Data used in applications such as CAD, CAM or GIS are complex, but the techniques developed for their treatment and stor age are not adapted enough to their needs. Examples of these types of data are spatiotemporal, scientific, economic or industrial information, in which data has not a single value because is defined by parameters, variables, functions, equations . . .. These complex data cannot be repre sented nor evaluated with the relational algebra types, then a new, more complex, data type is needed, the Constraint type. Constraint Databases were defined and implemented in order to handle this type of constraint data. When a Constraint Database is implemented, different configura tion parameters can be set up, depending on which database manager is going to be used, which constraint programming tool is going to solve the query evaluation, or which type of constraints can be involved. When some of these parameters are changed, the implementation that supports the evaluation of queries over constraints have to be changed too. For this reason, we propose the use of Model-Driven Engineering to model the queries over Constraint Databases in an independent way of the im plementation and the techniques used to evaluate the queries.Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-04095Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2009-13714Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2010- 21744-C02-0