Abstract
This paper introduces Yet Another Programming Exercises Interoperability Language (YAPExIL), a JSON format that aims to: (1) support several kinds of programming exercises behind traditional blank sheet activities; (2) capitalize on expressiveness and interoperability to constitute a strong candidate to standard open programming exercises format. To this end, it builds upon an existing open format named PExIL, by mitigating its weaknesses and extending its support for a handful of exercise types. YAPExIL is published as an open format, independent from any commercial vendor, and supported with dedicated open-source software.

Abstract
The architectural pattern of micro-services is being increasingly adopted by developers, facilitating the maintenance and scalability of the systems’ code. The adoption and consumption of these micro-services are often seen on the front-end code of the Web applications. Nevertheless, this adoption obliges web designers/developers to know where to look for those web services, to read their documentation and to write the request/response code as well to control the corresponding UI rendering. This whole process is time-consuming and error-prone. This article introduces SeCoGen as an interactive code generator for Web service parsing and consumption. The generator benefits from an HTTP request template, a query normalizer and dynamic UI templates. In order, to validate the generator feasibility and usefulness, a REST API to search for countries is used. © Ricardo Queirós.

Abstract

Abstract
The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a World Wide Web Consortium standard, based on the Resource Description Format standard. It is used to define ontologies. While large ontologies are useful for different applications, some tools require partial ontologies, based mostly on a hierarchical relationship of classes. In this article we present bOWL, a basic OWL browser, with the main goal of being pluggable into others, more significant, web applications. The tool was tested through its integration on LeXmart, a dictionary editing tool.

Abstract

Abstract
JavaScript is currently one of the most popular languages worldwide. Its meteoric rise is mainly due to the fact that the language is no longer bound to the limits of the browser and can now be used on several platforms. This growth has led to its increasing use by companies and, consequently, to become part of the curriculum in schools. Meanwhile, in the teaching-learning process of computer programming, teachers continue to use automatic code evaluation systems to relieve their time-consuming and error prone evaluation work. However, these systems reveal a number of issues: they are very generic (one size fits all), they have scarce features to foster exercises authoring, they do not adhere to interoperability standards (e.g. LMS communication), they rely solely on remote evaluators being exposed to single point of failure problems and reducing application performance and user experience, which is a feature well appreciated by the mobile users. In this context, LearnJS is presented as a Web playground for practicing the JavaScript language. The system uses a local evaluator (the user’s own browser) making response times small and thus benefiting the user experience. LearnJS also uses a sophisticated authoring system that allows the teacher to quickly create new exercises and aggregate them into gamified activities. Finally, LearnJS includes universal LMS connectors based on international specifications. In order to validate its use, an evaluation was made by a group of students of Porto Polytechnic aiming to validate the usability of its graphical user interface. © Ricardo Queirós.