Dynamic Virtual Join Point Dispatch

Conceptually, join points are points in the execution of a program and advice is late-bound to them. We propose the notion of virtual join points that makes this concept explicit not only at a conceptual, but also at implementation level. In current implementations of aspect-oriented languages, binding is performed early, at deploy-time, and only a limited residual dispatch is executed. Current implementations fall in the categories of modifying the application code, modifying the meta-level of an application, or interacting with the application by means of events—the latter two already realizing virtual join points to some degree. We provide an implementation of an aspect-oriented execution environment that supports truly virtual join points and discuss how this approach also favors optimizations in the execution environment

Abmash: Mashing Up Legacy Web Applications by Automated Imitation of Human Actions

Many business web-based applications do not offer applications programming interfaces (APIs) to enable other applications to access their data and functions in a programmatic manner. This makes their composition difficult (for instance to synchronize data between two applications). To address this challenge, this paper presents Abmash, an approach to facilitate the integration of such legacy web applications by automatically imitating human interactions with them. By automatically interacting with the graphical user interface (GUI) of web applications, the system supports all forms of integrations including bi-directional interactions and is able to interact with AJAX-based applications. Furthermore, the integration programs are easy to write since they deal with end-user, visual user-interface elements. The integration code is simple enough to be called a "mashup".Comment: Software: Practice and Experience (2013)

Designing "based" on place attachment-Tirana case study

People's knowledge, understandings, cognitions and beliefs about various aspects of the physical environments are different. Designers and architects while projecting have their own feelings about a place but they should also keep in mind the personal spaces, territoriality, family and group use of space, crowding, environmental meaning, and other topics. The problem of designing focusing and respecting the sense of space is maybe the most difficult problem in the design field. To understand the process of designing is one of the most complicated and complex issue in the design field. This process when is linked to feelings and place attachment gets into a difficult puzzle and labyrinth of problems that even the expert designer feels as novice. The paper outlines the concepts of place attachment, some of the developments in the city of Tirana, and in the end mentioning some of the buildings, places, and urban plans which left marks in their memories. The aim of the paper is mentioning some of the drastic changes in the city of Tirana, Albania, during different periods of time, some feelings and emotions for places of buildings that don't exist anymore and how these changes had remained strong in the minds, memories and phrases of Tirana's inhabitant. The analyses will precede describing and comparing some of the non- existing places, the replacing buildings and if they respected any of the facade elements, the architecture , the urban impact or the social environments and feelings that the places kept with them. The paper approach is based also on interviews, observations and readings regarding the sense of place, place attachment and feelings of habitants of Tirana on the old and new projects situated in the city of great developments

CPL: A Core Language for Cloud Computing -- Technical Report

Running distributed applications in the cloud involves deployment. That is, distribution and configuration of application services and middleware infrastructure. The considerable complexity of these tasks resulted in the emergence of declarative JSON-based domain-specific deployment languages to develop deployment programs. However, existing deployment programs unsafely compose artifacts written in different languages, leading to bugs that are hard to detect before run time. Furthermore, deployment languages do not provide extension points for custom implementations of existing cloud services such as application-specific load balancing policies. To address these shortcomings, we propose CPL (Cloud Platform Language), a statically-typed core language for programming both distributed applications as well as their deployment on a cloud platform. In CPL, application services and deployment programs interact through statically typed, extensible interfaces, and an application can trigger further deployment at run time. We provide a formal semantics of CPL and demonstrate that it enables type-safe, composable and extensible libraries of service combinators, such as load balancing and fault tolerance.Comment: Technical report accompanying the MODULARITY '16 submissio

The Limits of Reading Law in the Affordable Care Act Cases

One of the most highly lauded legacies of Justice Scalia\u27s decades-long tenure on the Supreme Court was his leadership of a movement to tether statutory interpretation more closely to statutory text. His dissents in the Affordable Care Act cases- National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and King v. Burwell- demonstrate both the nature and the limits of his success in that effort. These were two legal challenges, one constitutional and the other statutory, that threatened to bring down President Obama\u27s signature legislative achievement, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Both times the Court swerved away from a direct collision. And both times Justice Scalia accused the Court majority- led by Chief Justice Roberts- of twisting the statutory text. Justice Scalia was right about the twistifications. But that does not mean he was right to condemn them both. Sometimes the governing law of interpretation calls on judges to adopt an interpretation other than the one that most straightforwardly follows from the application of standard interpretive conventions to statutory text

Educational buildings in Albania: Typologies based on morphological developmen

There are about 3400 school buildings in Albania and constantly new schools are being renovated and built. It is widely known that the educational sector and the built environment contributes to the achievements of learning and teaching, and causes many effects in the learning process. The importance of the educational infrastructures, is the main purpose of this study, which tries to categorize the typologies, morphology, and space distribution of schools, designed in the years 1945-1990. This period corresponds to the largest number of school’s constructions of ‘type models’ in Albania. The study is focused on the analysis of 150 different school’s plans and based mostly on primary resources collected from the Central Technical Archive of Construction, Tirana