This report puts forward a software architecture aimed at providing tecnological support for User Interface design in the framework of a rigorous methodology for Interactive Systems development. Starting from the formal specification of the application layer, the methodology aims at the systematic development of the interactive system, with the main goal of creating high quality interfaces with a high degree of assistance to the user, error preventing features and contextual sensitivity. The proposed system, GAMA-X, offers an architecture for the systematic and semi-automatic development of this kind of interface, including tools that support the various steps of development. The architecture of the GAMA-X system is presented, with a special focus on the modules more closely related with the User Interface, as well as the description of a specification language for the Dialogue Controller. Some aspects about the communication between modules and about the presentation layer are also discussed.

CRDTs are distributed data types that make eventual consistency of a distributed object possible and non ad-hoc. Specifically, state-based CRDTs achieve this by sharing local state changes through shipping the entire state, that is then merged to other replicas with an idempotent, associative, and commutative join operation, ensuring convergence. This imposes a large communication overhead as the state size becomes larger. We introduce Delta State Conflict-Free Replicated Datatypes ({\delta}-CRDT), which make use of {\delta}-mutators, defined in such a way to return a delta-state, typically, with a much smaller size than the full state. Delta-states are joined to the local state as well as to the remote states (after being shipped). This can achieve the best of both worlds: small messages with an incremental nature, as in operation-based CRDTs, disseminated over unreliable communication channels, as in traditional state-based CRDTs. We introduce the {\delta}-CRDT framework, and we explain it through establishing a correspondence to current state- based CRDTs. In addition, we present two anti-entropy algorithms: a basic one that provides eventual convergence, and another one that ensures both convergence and causal consistency. We also introduce two {\delta}-CRDT specifications of well-known replicated datatypes.

Consistency management, the ability to detect, diagnose and handle inconsistencies, is crucial during the development process in Model-driven Engineering (MDE). As the popularity and application scenarios of MDE expanded, a variety of different techniques were proposed to address these tasks in specific contexts. Of the various stages of consistency management, this work focuses on inconsistency fixing in MDE, where such task is embodied by model repair techniques. This paper proposes a feature-based classification system for model repair techniques, based on an systematic review of previously proposed approaches. We expect this work to assist both the developers of novel techniques and the MDE practitioners looking for suitable solutions.

A spreadsheet usually starts as a simple and singleuser software artifact, but, as frequent as in other software systems, quickly evolves into a complex system developed by many actors. Often, different users work on different aspects of the same spreadsheet: while a secretary may be only involved in adding plain data to the spreadsheet, an accountant may define new business rules, while an engineer may need to adapt the spreadsheet content so it can be used by other software systems. Unfortunately, spreadsheet systems do not offer modular mechanisms, and as a consequence, some of the previous tasks may be defined by adding intrusive “code” to the spreadsheet. In this paper we go through the design and implementation of an aspect-oriented language for spreadsheets so that users can work on different aspects of a spreadsheet in a modular way. For example, aspects can be defined in order to introduce new business rules to an existing spreadsheet, or to manipulate the spreadsheet data to be ported to another system. Aspects are defined as aspect-oriented program specifications that are dynamically woven into the underlying spreadsheet by an aspect weaver. In this aspect-oriented style of spreadsheet development, different users develop, or reuse, aspects without adding intrusive code to the original spreadsheet. Such code is added/executed by the spreadsheet weaving mechanism proposed in this paper.