I know it's pretty obvious but the encoding may be wort mentioning.

In fact, this is not a serious post--it's an Xmas gift.

Enjoy and Merry Xmas + Happy New Year.

Ralf

PS: More background on this "contribution to image processing" can be found here:

https://userpages.uni-koblenz.de/~laemmel/bildverarbeitung/

https://professor-fish.blogspot.com/2009/08/same-guy-as-grammarware-haskellware.html

Regards,

Ralf

I have even a draft paper in limbo ... so much in limbo that I don't even link to it here.

In fact, I admit that it is very difficult to get anything done scientifically and practically on this topic.

Thanks to some recent collaboration, there are some cool results and a new draft paper.

Feedback very much appreciated.

Regards,

Ralf

https://www.uni-koblenz.de/~laemmel/xomjdom/

Transcript of an API migration for two XML APIs

Status

• Paper submitted for publication
• Wrapper implementation uploaded

 

Authors

Thiago Tonelli Bartolomei and Krzysztof Czarnecki and Ralf Lämmel and Tijs van der Storm

 

Abstract

API migration refers to the problem of adapting an application such that the usage of a given API (the source API) is replaced by the usage of an alternative API (the target API) serving the same domain. One may attempt to automate API migration by wrapping or some form of (source- or byte-) code transformation. API migration is relatively well understood for the special case where source and target APIs are essentially different versions of the same API. API migration is much less understood for the more general case where source API and target API have been developed more or less independently of each other. The present paper exercises a simple instance of the general case and develops engineering techniques towards the mastery of API migration. That is, a wrapper-based migration between two prominent XML APIs for the Java platform is studied where the various differences between the chosen APIs are identified, classified and counted in a systematic manner.

Deadline seems to be in 30 hours from now.

If anyone has suggestions, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,

Ralf

https://www.uni-koblenz.de/~laemmel/OdeToProlog/

Scrap Your Boilerplate---Prologically!

Status (30 June 2009)

Paper available in draft form.
Code distribution not yet available online.

 

Author(s)

Ralf Lämmel

 

Abstract

``Scrap Your Boilerplate'' (SYB) is an established style of generic functional programming. The present paper reconstructs SYB within the Prolog language with the help of the univ operator and higher-order logic programming techniques. We pay attention to the particularities of Prolog. For instance, we deal with traversal of non-ground terms. We also develop an alternative model of SYB-like traversal based on metaprogramming. This generative, type-driven model is also amenable to type-driven optimization.

 

Keywords

Scrap Your Boilerplate, Haskell, Prolog, Stratego.

 

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{OdeToProlog,
 author = "Ralf L{\"a}mmel",
 title = "{Scrap Your Boilerplate---Prologically!}",
 booktitle = "Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming",
 publisher = ACM,
 year = 2009,
 note = "6 pages"
}

 

Downloads

• Draft paper: [.pdf]

At this point, we have 80+ registered participants.

REGISTRATION DEADLINE:
June 7

The Call for Participation follows.

Regards,

Ralf

GTTSE 2009, 06-11 July, 2009, Braga, Portugal

3rd International Summer School on
Generative and Transformational Techniques in Software Engineering

https://gttse.wikidot.com/

REGISTRATION DEADLINE:
June 7

SCOPE AND FORMAT

The summer school brings together PhD students, lecturers, technology
presenters, as well as other researchers and practitioners who are
interested in the generation and the transformation of programs, data,
models, meta-models, and documentation. This concerns many areas of
software engineering: software reverse and re-engineering,
model-driven approaches, automated software engineering, generic
language technology, to name a few. These areas differ with regard to
the specific sorts of meta-models (or grammars, schemas, formats etc.)
that underlie the involved artifacts, and with regard to the specific
techniques that are employed for the generation and the transformation
of the artifacts.  The tutorials are given by renowned representatives
of complementary approaches and problem domains. Each tutorial
combines foundations, methods, examples, and tool support. The program
of the summer school also features invited technology presentations,
which present setups for generative and transformational
techniques. These presentations complement each other in terms of the
chosen application domains, case studies, and the underlying
concepts. The program of the school also features a participants
workshop. All summer school material will be collected in proceedings
that are handed out to the participants. Formal proceedings will be
compiled after the summer school, where all contributions are
subjected to additional reviewing.

The formal proceedings of the previous two instances of the summer
school (2005 and 2007) were published as volumes 4143 and 5235 in the
Lecture Notes in Computer Science series of Springer-Verlag.


TUTORIALS

   * Software Product Line Refactoring
     Paulo Borba, Univ. Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

   * The TXL Source Transformation Cookbook
     James R. Cordy, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada

   * Chasing Diagrams in the Mapping Forests of Model Transformations
     Zinovy Diskin, Univ. of Waterloo and Univ. of Toronto, Canada

   * Generating Language Tools with JastAdd
     Görel Hedin, Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden.

   * Model Driven Language Engineering with Kermeta
     Jean-Marc Jézéquel, IRISA, Rennes, France

   * Rascal: Meta-programming Made Easy
     Paul Klint, CWI and Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands

   * Sourcerer: Slicing and Dicing Large Amounts of Open Source Code
     Cristina Videira Lopes, University of California, Irvine, USA

   * The Theory and Practice of Modeling Language Design for
     Model-Based Engineering
     Bran Selic, Malina Software Corp., Canada


RESEARCH 2.0 EVENT

   * Research 2.0 and Software Engineering 2.0
     Jean-Marie Favre and Denis Avrilionis
     OneTree Technologies SA, Luxembourg and
     University of Grenoble, France


SHORT TUTORIALS

   * The 'Archæology' of Transformations
     Michel Wermelinger and Yijun Yu, The Open University. UK

   * Compilation for Embedded and Reconfigurable
     Computing Architectures
     João M. P. Cardoso, University of Porto, Portugal

   * Lightweight Domain-Specific Language Processing in Kiama
     Anthony Sloane, Macquarie University, Australia

   * Genesys: Service-Oriented Construction of Property
     Conform Code Generators
     Tiziana Margaria, University of Potsdam, Germany

   * The Need for Early Aspects
     Ana Moreira, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

   * Model Transformation Chains for
     Model-Driven Performance Engineering
     Mathias Fritzsche, SAP Research


ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE

   * João M. Fernandes (Program Co-Chair), Univ. do Minho, Portugal
   * Ralf Lämmel (Program Co-Chair), Univ. Koblenz-Landau, Germany
   * João Saraiva, Universidade do Minho, Portugal
   * Joost Visser, Software Improvement Group, The Netherlands


ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

For additional information on the registration, program, venue, and
other details of the summer school, please consult the web page:

   https://gttse.wikidot.com/

There is also a contact email address:

   gttse09 AT list.uni MINUS koblenz.de.

Abstract

For about 4 years now I have been sporadically talking about API migration as a scientific and technical challenge as well as a potential business idea. It all started with some background in grammar engineering, formal semantics, and re-engineering which made me see that APIs are tricky software languages that account for a good part of the intricacies in automated software evolution. I was fired up when I acquired a handle on Microsoft's XML APIs during my recent work on the XML team at Microsoft. At this point I gained confidence in the business value and the eventual feasibility of API migration. While API migration is arguably the top subject on my research agenda, I haven't made substantial progress over the last few years. Meanwhile others have made both expected and unexpected contributions to the subject, which I would like to put into perspective. However, I contend that the hard problem is still to be attacked. In this talk, I am going to reexamine the landscape of API migration, and submit a mid-term call-to-arms to cross the API migration's Rubicon. I will also report on some experiments or experiences with API usage analysis, API protocol specification, API-related flow analysis of programs, and transformation technology for API migration.

My slides are also online here. I am happy enough to work with Tijs van der Storm (CWI, Amsterdam) on this very topic. Tijs is currently visiting researcher at our department in Koblenz. We expect to release a paper on the "API migration's Rubicon" soon. Please stay tuned. The slides also show a few diagrams for Java API usage. We do such usage analysis to better understand the realities of APIs. (Thanks are due here to two students of mine: Ruwen Hahn and Jürgen Starek.) Again, we hope to publish some results of this project very soon.

Regards,

Ralf

Getting all these huge Java grammars to converge was not easy. We are still learning how to do this properly. We are still working on our transformation language, but we feel the results are good enough to go public now. The magic thing about grammar convergence is that it pushes you to necessarily find all the details of grammar variation. Arguably, grammar convergence should be more automatic. However, by asking you to make the transformation decisions, it helps you to understand the result.

From now on, suites of related grammars should have no excuse to be flawed and close-lipped as far as their relationships go.

Regards,

Ralf

PS: Now that I repaired the link I can as well put the abstract here.

Java is Not Syntax-safe -- Apparently

Authors

Ralf Lämmel and Vadim Zaytsev

 

Abstract

Using a mechanized process, we have reverse-engineered the relationships between the 6 different grammars that are contained in 3 versions of the Java Language Specification (JLS). To this end, we have extracted the grammars from (the HTML representation of) the JLS, and we have systematically resolved or captured all accidental or intended differences by grammar transformations. The project reveals a considerable number of problems with the grammars such as productions that did not define the intended language.

My colleagues keep telling me that things get better, and arguably, I might have arrived at the turning point. Of great help is here that Vadim Zaytsev (a PhD student of X and me from Amsterdam; Vadim is getting closer to the finish line) has joined the software-languages team in Koblenz last spring. This is particularly exciting because he has profound background in grammarware engineering – a topic that I have been talking about a lot over the last few years without delivering any new stuff except perhaps for the various X/O/R papers. For the last 3 months, we have been working on some grammarware engineering activities. We have been hacking in the best sense of the word. Today, we are proud to reveal our work on “grammar convergence”.

I have just uploaded an intro paper on grammar convergence to my website, but expect some more stuff over the next few weeks and months. (This paper has just been submitted, and your feedback is welcome.) I quote from the conclusion of the paper: “If unit testing is the simple, pragmatic, and effective method to generally validate the I/O behavior of software modules, then grammar convergence is the simple, pragmatic, and effective method to keep scattered grammar knowledge in sync. In addition, the method can be used to capture the intended or the accidental differences between instances of scattered grammar knowledge. Further, grammar convergence also applies at the instance level (populated by XML trees, derivation trees, parse trees, etc.). That is, it can compare and converge data from different software artifacts.”

Final plug: Are you attending SLE 2008 – the First International Conference on Software Language Engineering? It’s end of September in Toulouse (which is in France, for geographically challenged readers). The scientific quality of the event taken for granted, let me mention that I have heard of phenomenal cuisine aspects.  Please consider attending. This conference on Software Language Engineering unites some communities that previously had mainly workshops as their forum. Imagine this: we had 100+ abstract submissions for this first iteration of the conference. Well, 90 sharp actually made the deadline in the end and submitted a proper paper. So we will have 18 papers over 2 days in the enjoyable surroundings of Toulouse and the MODELS conference with its various workshops – many of them also relevant for Software Language Engineers. Looking at the program, I see folks with background in refactoring, compiler construction, programming languages, declarative programming and executable specification, visual languages, modeling languages, formal methods, grammar-based programming, software transformation, software re- and reverse engineering, and model-driven development. Of course, I am biased, but this is a conference where I am sure that my broad interests are sufficient to appreciate each and every paper. The key is that all presentations assemble around the notion of software language engineering.

Regards,

Ralf

Speaking of Isabelle and “approval”, I have uploaded a new paper (draft) to my website. It uses Isabelle/HOL to develop a sort of metatheory for traversal strategies. It is my first project on theorem proving. (I am sane enough not to count type-class-based programming in Haskell as theorem proving.) (Also, don’t get confused with the URL’s ending, “isabelle2”. There is really just one Isabelle/HOL paper so far. The URL helps me to avoid confusion with my youngest daughter’s photo directory, even though it is on a different host.) This is joint work with Markus Kaiser, a Mathematician, who has worked on theorem proving for some time (mostly in the context of cryptology) before he joined the SLE team in Koblenz.

This paper has just been submitted. Hence feedback, if any, is appreciated, and will be considered. The actual code distribution is still a bit of a mess, as of writing, but it will be fine, if the paper’s web site says so – soon, hopefully.

Regards,

Ralf

Title: A Formal Model of Traversal Strategies

Authors: Markus Kaiser and Ralf Lämmel

URL: https://www.uni-koblenz.de/~laemmel/isabelle2/

Abstract: There is an observable increase in interest in traversal expressiveness in programming: there are new rewriting languages, programming-language extensions, and combinator libraries that enable programmers to design and deploy traversals over structured data. Such traversal programs can go wrong in new ways. For instance, a traversal may suddenly fail or diverge. It is important to gain better understanding of properties of traversal programs so that programmers make more knowledgeable choices of traversal schemes, and programming environments may provide improved documentation, targeted checks, and other support. This paper presents a machine-checked, Isabelle/HOL-based, formal model of traversal strategies. Amongst others, the model provides sufficient conditions for traversal programs not to fail and not to diverge. The model with its mechanized proofs makes systematic use of Isabelle/HOL's various capabilities for dealing with recursion or induction.