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Showing posts from March, 2012

Should I declare defeat on the research topic of API migration?

Of course, I won't, but perhaps I should! Then, I could turn to lower-hanging fruits in research, which I first need to spot, which I can't though because I am a bit obsessed with API migration (and admittedly some other stuff such as megamodeling ). Sigh! It was around 2004 that I became interested in API migration and I have talked about it here and there ever since. Perhaps I am thinking that talking about a difficult problem of interest helps in discovering the solution of the problem, or at least a sensible path to go. Wishful thinking so far! In theory , the objective of API migration made a lot of sense while I was on the XML team at Microsoft because there are obviously way too many XML APIs. In practice , nothing happened on this front because I didn't understand automated API migration well enough back then. Add to this that API migration is something that is potentially risky for the API provider and the API migrator . So you need to mash up a rocket scientist

More than you ever wanted to know about grammar-based testing

Preamble : Ever since 1999 +/- 100 years, I have been working (sporadically, intensively) on grammar-based testing. The latest result was our SLE'11 paper on grammar comparison (joint work with Bernd Fischer and Vadim Zaytsev). I have tried previously to compile a comprehensive slide deck on grammar-based testing, also with coverage on this blog , but this was relatively non-ambitious. With the new SLE'11 results at hand and with the firm goal of pushing grammar-based testing more into CS education (in the context of both formal language theory and software language engineering), I have now developed an uber-comprehensive slide deck with awesome illustrations for the kids. If you are reading this post ahead of the lecture, if you are still planning to attend, then you are well advised to bring brains and coffee. You may also bring a body bag, in case you pass out or worse. As it happens, this is "too much stuff" for a regular talk, lecture, or any reasonable format

Technical space travel for developers, researchers, and educators

The inevitable has happened. I have committed myself to giving the first major talk on 101companies (not counting the AOSD 2011 tutorial, which described an early view on the universe). This outing talk happens to be at the CS Department at University of Nebraska at Omaha, as I will be visiting Victor Winter the next two weeks. Speaker : Ralf Lämmel (University of Koblenz-Landau) Acknowledgement : Joint work with Jean-Marie Favre, Thomas Schmorleiz, and Andrei Varanovich. Title : Technical space travel for developers, researchers, and educators Abstract : A technical space is a technology and community context in computer science and information technology. For example, the technical space of XMLware deals with data representation in XML, data modeling with XML schema, and data processing with XQuery, XSLT, DOM, and LINQ to XML. Likewise, the technical space of tableware deals with data representation in a relational database, data modeling according to the relational model or the ER