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

Conf Researchr: A Domain-Specific Content Management System for Managing Large Conference Websites

Conferences are great opportunities for sharing research, debating solutions, and networking. For the organizing committee there is a considerable deal of complexity and effort required to provide attendees and organizers with ways to find and manage programs, sessions, papers, tracks, talks, and authors. Eelco Visser found an opportunity to provide an integrated solution to these problems by designing the Conf Researchr conference management system in 2014 using our own domain-specific web programming language WebDSL. In this paper, we highlight the impact Eelco had on conference management, and how Conf Researchr evolved to become the platform of choice for hosting over 900 conference and workshop editions in SIGPLAN and SIGSOFT, among other areas of computer science research

Towards Language-Parametric Semantic Editor Services Based on Declarative Type System Specifications (Brave New Idea Paper)

Editor services assist programmers to more effectively write and comprehend code. Implementing editor services correctly is not trivial. This paper focuses on the specification of semantic editor services, those that use the semantic model of a program. The specification of refactorings is a common subject of study, but many other semantic editor services have received little attention. We propose a language-parametric approach to the definition of semantic editor services, using a declarative specification of the static semantics of the programming language, and constraint solving. Editor services are specified as constraint problems, and language specifications are used to ensure correctness. We describe our approach for the following semantic editor services: reference resolution, find usages, goto subclasses, code completion, and the extract definition refactoring. We do this in the context of Statix, a constraint language for the specification of type systems. We investigate the specification of editor services in terms of Statix constraints, and the requirements these impose on a suitable solver