Defining Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) through functional abstractions can reduce the complexity that arises from mutable abstractions. Recent examples, such as Facebook's React GUI framework have shown, how modelling the view as a functional projection from the application state to a visual representation can reduce the number of interacting objects and thus help to improve the reliabiliy of the system. This however comes at the price of a more rigid, functional framework where programmers are forced to express visual entities with functional abstractions, detached from the way one intuitively thinks about the physical world. In contrast to that, the GUI Framework Morphic allows interactions in the graphical domain, such as grabbing, dragging or resizing of elements to evolve an application at runtime, providing liveness and directness in the development workflow. Modelling each visual entity through mutable abstractions however makes it difficult to ensure correctness when GUIs start to grow more complex. Furthermore, by evolving morphs at runtime through direct manipulation we diverge more and more from the symbolic description that corresponds to the morph. Given that both of these approaches have their merits and problems, is there a way to combine them in a meaningful way that preserves their respective benefits? As a solution for this problem, we propose to lift Morphic's concept of direct manipulation from the mutation of state to the transformation of source code. In particular, we will explore the design, implementation and integration of a bidirectional mapping between the graphical representation and a functional and declarative symbolic description of a graphical user interface within a self hosted development environment. We will present Transmorphic, a functional take on the Morphic GUI Framework, where the visual and structural properties of morphs are defined in a purely functional, declarative fashion. In Transmorphic, the developer is able to assemble different morphs at runtime through direct manipulation which is automatically translated into changes in the code of the application. In this way, the comprehensiveness and predictability of direct manipulation can be used in the context of a purely functional GUI, while the effects of the manipulation are reflected in a medium that is always in reach for the programmer and can even be used to incorporate the source transformations into the source files of the application.

Change can be observed in our environment and in the technology we build. While changes in the environment happen continuously and implicitly, our technology has to be kept in sync with the changing world around it. Although we can prepare for some of the changes for most of them we cannot. This is especially true for next-generation mobile communication systems that are expected to support the creation of a ubiquitous society where virtually everything is connected and made available within an organic information network. Resources will frequently join or leave the network, new types of media or new combinations of existing types will be used to interact and cooperate, and services will be tailored to preferences and needs of individual customers to better meet their needs. This paper outlines our research in the area of dynamic service adaptation to provide concepts and technologies allowing for such environments. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Creating fonts is a complex task that requires expert knowledge in a variety of domains. Often, this knowledge is not held by a single person, but spread across a number of domain experts. A central concept needed for designing fonts is the glyph, an elemental symbol representing a readable character. Required domains include designing glyph shapes, engineering rules to combine glyphs for complex scripts and checking legibility. This process is most often iterative and requires communication in all directions. This report outlines a platform that aims to enhance the means of communication, describes our prototyping process, discusses complex font rendering and editing in a live environment and an approach to generate code based on a user’s live-edits.

CSOM/PL is a software product line (SPL) derived from applying multi-dimensional separation of concerns (MDSOC) techniques to the domain of high-level language virtual machine (VM) implementations. For CSOM/PL, we modularised CSOM, a Smalltalk VM implemented in C, using VMADL (virtual machine architecture description language). Several features of the original CSOM were encapsulated in VMADL modules and composed in various combinations. In an evaluation of our approach, we show that applying MDSOC and SPL principles to a domain as complex as that of VMs is not only feasible but beneficial, as it improves understandability, maintainability, and configurability of VM implementations without harming performance.

Pattern matching is a well-established concept in the functional programming community. It provides the means for concisely identifying and destructuring values of interest. This enables a clean separation of data structures and respective functionality, as well as dispatching functionality based on more than a single value. Unfortunately, expressive pattern matching facilities are seldomly incorporated in present object-oriented programming languages. We present a seamless integration of pattern matching facilities in an object-oriented and dynamically typed programming language: Newspeak. We describe language extensions to improve the practicability and integrate our additions with the existing programming environment for Newspeak. This report is based on the first author’s master’s thesis.