Modern software development is increasingly dependent on components, libraries, and frameworks coming from third-party vendors or open-source suppliers and made available through a number of platforms (or forges). This way of writing software puts an emphasis on reuse and on composition, commoditizing the services that modern applications require. On the other hand, bugs and vulnerabilities in a single library living in one such ecosystem can affect, directly or by transitivity, a huge number of other libraries and applications. Currently, only product-level information on library dependencies is used to contain this kind of danger, but this knowledge often reveals itself too imprecise to lead to effective (and possibly automated) handling policies. We will discuss how fine-grained function-level dependencies can greatly improve reliability and reduce the impact of vulnerabilities on the whole software ecosystem.

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This paper reports the main findings of a panel about trends in search engine interaction, focused upon the use of search engines for performing complex processes. The discussion focuses on the different evolutionary path followed by search engines with respect to other Web and information management solutions, making end users acquainted with the simplistic and never changing keyword-based query paradigm. The analysis delves into the pros and cons of personalization, contextualization, and exploration of Web information, with special attention to the presentation and user interaction aspects. In the end, we also wonder if the keyword-based query paradigm will ever change.@en