[aosd-announce] CFP: SPLAT! 2007--Software Engineering Properties of Languages and Aspect Technologies

[Johan Brichau]

SPLAT! 2007--Software Engineering Properties of Languages and Aspect  
Technologies
     A workshop affiliated with AOSD 2007
     Monday March 12, 2007. Vancouver, B.C, Canada
     http://www.aosd.net/workshops/splat/2007/

     Call for Papers


Software engineering is a complex activity that may involve multiple  
languages, databases, internal and external documentation, design  
documents, makefiles, formal specifications, and still more kinds of  
software artefacts. This implies that separation of concerns must be  
supported in a way which will cope with heterogeneous sets of  
artefacts, and such that it is possible to cross the boundaries from  
source code in one language to source code in another language, and  
on to all the other kinds of artefacts. This year's SPLAT workshop  
uses the boundary crossing challenge as a starting point for the  
exploration of the software engineering properties of the design of  
AOSD languages and systems.

The so-called '-ilities', e.g., comprehensibility, evolvability,  
modularity, and analyzability are crucial yardsticks for the  
assessment of the quality of software engineering activities and  
products, and it is not acceptable if the 'ilities' are ignored as  
soon as the software system complexity goes up, or in particular when  
it involves a heterogeneous set of artefacts. Generally, designers  
and users of aspect-oriented languages and systems must understand  
the effect on the 'ilities' of any aspect-oriented language, feature,  
system, tool, style, etc. that they choose to use, from the  
perspectives of multiple stakeholders, including end users, language  
designers, and tool providers. Quality in software engineering  
activities and products is often a question of balancing  
contradictory forces and ideals. It is, therefore, critical to  
understand these tradeoffs.

This workshop will explore issues in designing AOSD languages and  
systems that promote good software engineering properties, for  
example, with respect to analyzability, predictability,  
expressiveness, evolvability, and semantic interactions, and in  
particular in context of heterogeneous artefacts creating boundary  
crossing challenges. The workshop aims to identify some hard and deep  
issues and tradeoffs in achieving particular properties in AOSD  
languages and systems, to make these issues and tradeoffs explicit,  
and to try to characterize each conflict and, to the extent possible,  
describe useful solutions.

Topics
------
The following list specifies a core subset of the topics which are  
relevant at this year's SPLAT workshop, and moreover for each of them  
we encourage points of view that include multiple heteregenous  
artefacts, multiple languages, or in some other way situations that  
give rise to boundary crossing challenges:

     * Identification, description, and analysis of some key  
conflicts among desirable properties of languages and tools for AOSD  
(the "-ilities"), and their causes and effects.
     * Experience reports or motivated examples of concrete  
applications of AOSD languages or tools that have demonstrated one or  
more key conflicts among -ility properties.
     * Novel aspect languages, language features or tool support  
approaches that provide new insights or novel approaches to achieving  
-ility properties that normally conflict (e.g., achieving a good  
balance between expressability and analyzability).
     * Novel aspect language and system design, along with an  
analysis of the impact upon a key conflict among -ility properties.  
This could, for instance, be a new language construct, along with an  
argument about why it promotes analyzability without reducing  
expressiveness in any significant way.
     * "Patterns" or taxonomies of some of the -ility properties,  
their interactions, their costs and benefits, and drawbacks or  
strengths of existing approaches with respect to achieving them.

Format
------
We intend the format of the workshop to focus attendees' attention on  
a small number of key issues that are of broad interest to the  
participants, as identified by the workshop organizers based on an  
analysis of the submitted papers. The format of the workshop will  
incorporate structured group discussions and presentations/ 
discussions of selected topics and submissions. These venues will  
enable attendees to get a better understanding and additional  
insights on these topics.

Submission Guidelines
---------------------
Attendance to the workshop is limited, to facilitate lively  
discussions and the exchange of ideas. Prospective participants will  
be solicited to submit a 4-8 page position paper in PDF format  
(standard ACM SIGPLAN conference format: http://www.acm.org/sigs/ 
sigplan/authorInformation.htm), no later than Friday, January 26th,  
2007. Submission is by email to splat at cs.utwente.nl.

The position papers will be reviewed by the program committee.  
Submitted papers will be treated as confidential during the review  
process. The Submitted papers will be selected for incorporation into  
the workshop proceedings (published as a technical report). You will  
receive notification of acceptance in workshop and proceedings on  
February 2nd, 2007.

Important Dates
---------------
Submission Deadline: January 26th, 2007
Notification of acceptance in workshop : February 2nd, 2007

Organizers
----------
Lodewijk Bergmans (University of Twente, Netherlands)
Johan Brichau (Universite catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
Erik Ernst (University of Aarhus, denmark)
Kris Gybels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)


SPLAT07 is supported by AOSD-europe (http://aosd-europe.net)

----------------------------
Johan Brichau
johan.brichau at uclouvain.be