The teaching-learning process is complex in nature, requiring many tasks and skills to achieve success in the construction of knowledge.As per any particular kind of cognitive development, teaching and learning Computer Programming is no different in this regard: tasks must be executed, sometimes repeatedly, and skills must be developed.Despite different approaches and methodologies, exercising what has been studied is proven to be effective in pretty much any teaching-learning process.Many tools have been developed throughout time to aid in the execution of this important task, sometimes approaching the problem from the students' perspective, sometimes from the teachers'.This paper presents Goliath, a semi-automatic generator of Computer Programming exercises, whose functionality is based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, a Domain-Specific Language (DSL), and an online application that binds them together.Goliath's goals are directed towards teachers (and indirectly, students) by aiming to lower the burden of repeatedly constructing exercises.This is achieved through the use of templates that allow for automatic variations of an exercise to be created instantly, while relying on a common foundation.Goliath is meant to be a facilitator, raising availability of exercise lists, while avoiding repetition and the common mistakes that accompany their construction.

An ever-growing landscape of programming technologies (tools, languages, libraries and frameworks) has rapidly become the norm in many domains of computer programming-Web Development being the most noticeable example.The concurrent use of many compartmentalised technologies has advantages: it allows for flexibility in implementation, while also improving reusability.On the other hand, this proliferation tends to create convoluted development workflows that must be (painstakingly) planned, managed and maintained.The combination of multiple languages, libraries, frameworks and tools (Ingredients) in a single project effectively forms a Programming Cocktail, that can rapidly become cognitive and financially onerous.Aiming at understanding these complex situations, an ontology was created to provide a formal and structured analysis of these cocktails.It emerged from a survey of technologies that several companies are currently using to develop their systems, and aims to provide support for better understanding, classifying and characterising Programming Cocktails.This paper presents not only the ontology itself, but also the consequent knowledge that was constructed and structured through its development.

Each programmer has his own way of programming but some criteria can be applied when analysing code: there are a set of best practices that can be checked, or "not so common" instructions that are mainly used by experts that can be found.Considering that all programs that are going to be compared are correct, it's possible to infer the experience level of the programmer or the proficiency level of the solution.The approach presented in this paper has as main goal to compare sets of solutions to the same problem and infer the programmers profile.This can be used to evaluate the programmer skills, the proficiency on a given language or evaluate programming students.A tool to automatically profiling Java programmers called PP (Programmer Profiler) is presented in this paper as a proof of concept.

Program Comprehension is improved if: i) the Problem and Program Domains can be related, and ii) this relation is shown in a suitable way to the programmer. Currently, there are few strategies for reaching this important goal because it is not easy to: i) Identify meaningful representations of the problem and program domains, and ii) Define a linking procedure. This poster describes three strategies to overcome the difficulties mentioned above. These strategies use static and dynamic information and traditional compilation techniques for relating both domains.

An effective program comprehension is reached when it is possible to view and relate what happens when the program is executed, synchronized with its effects in the real world concepts. This enables the interconnection of program’s meaning at both problem and program domains. To sustain this statement we need (i) to develop a tool which provides and synchronizes views at both domains, and (ii) to perform an experiment to measure the actual impact of this approach. So, in this working session we aim at discussing the benefits of providing synchronized domain visualizations. We also envisage to discuss the preparation and conduction of appropriate experiments that will test that benefits. A case study will be used and the discussion will be supported by experimental material specially prepared for the occasion, but adapted from material already used in previous experiments.

In the context of our research project, we are looking for program comprehension tools that are able to interconnect operational and behavioral views, aiming at aiding the programmer to relate problem and program domains to reach a full understanding of software systems. In particular we have been studying the adaptation of that principle to Web applications. In this context, we had designed and implemented a tool called WebAppViewer. In this paper, we emphasize the development of the module (BORS) that is responsible for providing interconnection functionalities and we propose a tool demonstration. A dedicated Web server is included in the system to allow the execution of the piece of code selected by the user. This feature is used to relate the source text (html, php, etc) executed by the server, with the web page received by the client. Code instrumentation is used to collect dynamic information.