SPLAT! 2006
Software Engineering Properties of Languages and Aspect Technologies
A workshop affiliated with AOSD 2006
March 21, 2006. Bonn, Germany
Call for Papers
The so-called '-ilities' are crucial yardsticks for the assessment of the
quality of software engineering activities and products, e.g.,
modularity, comprehensibility, evolvability, and analyzability. Hence,
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. Most aspect-related
capabilities provide some benefits, but they also incur some
disadvantages. Such a tradeoff arises, for example, when considering
the expressiveness property versus the analyzability property. More
expressiveness usually implies less analyzability, and vice
versa. Similarly, the "obliviousness" feature improves software
adaptability via non-invasive extensions, but it may well lead to poor
designs that expose too many join points to enable obliviousness, thus
permitting changes that the software is not designed to handle. This
has led to numerous proposals for tool and linguistic mechanisms to
restrict or control the set of available join points, to explicitly
define adaptation interfaces, or to show developers explicitly the
join points that will be affected and enable them to eliminate
unintended ones. This reduces obliviousness in favor of
predictability, analyzability, and it reduces the potential for design
errors. 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. It 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 potential resolutions, if any.
Topics
- 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.
Motivation
This workshop will advance the field of AOSD language design and
software engineering by emphasizing the need to understand the
practical consequences of language design decisions on the conflicts
between desirable software engineering properties of aspect-oriented
software. In particular, it will help language designers and software
engineering researchers understand and evaluate the tradeoffs entailed
by aspect language features, and address the need for consistent
language design to improve the management of the deep conflicts among
desirable properties of AOSD software activies and products.
SPLAT provides a forum for several groups of people to meet and
discuss. In particular, aspect language designers, AOSD tool support
developers and aspect programmers discuss the software engineering
properties of existing and novel AOSD approaches. While these three
groups have a common goal of improving the quality of aspectualized
software, the activities they engage in tend to have different
overriding forces in designing approaches to AOSD: when programming
aspects, it is very convenient to use novel AOSD approaches providing
powerful and flexible base-code adaptation mechanisms, but at the same
time it is crucial that the overall code readability and evolvability
of the software is maintained in the long run. Language designers
would probably often go for powerful abstraction mechanisms or for
type system like control mechanisms, depending on whether they are
from one or the other language community. Tool designers and
implementers might be able to mitigate this conflict somewhat by
improving on sophisticated views of software and by building databases
of static information. Previous incarnations of SPLAT and other
workshops have shown that these different forces have lead to both
conflicts and feedback among these activities:
- The concept of making aspects oblivious to the base code has
lead some language designers to consider more expressive pointcut
languages. Many people have however expressed objections to the
danger that they would no longer being able to foresee where and how
an aspect influences the base code. In response, language designers
have introduced the notion of limiting the hooks available to an
aspect or introducing the notion of explicit pointcut interfaces,
while tool support developers have aimed at pointcut analysis tools
for assisting the programmer. The question of whether and how the
conflicts of expressivity and comprehensibility can be solved and
what direction novel AOSD language designers should take is however
still unresolved.
- Currently AOSD concepts are moving from the realm of Java to
being applied to other programming languages as well. The need for
integrating these concepts in a clean and orthogonal way with the
existing concepts of the language can lead language designers to
take novel approaches. In the case of work done on C++ this has lead
to the use of templates in combination with pointcuts, and work done
on Lisp has lead to a consideration of dynamic scoping as an
alternative means of implementing aspects. There is however the
question of how this influences readability, evolvability etc.
- Designers of tools for aspect refactoring have expressed a
desire for novel aspect language features to ease the refactoring
process, such as making additional properties on joinpoints
available and even including new types of joinpoints. The question
however remains what impact such features will have on readability,
evolvability etc.
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 may
incorporate poster/demo sessions, structured group discussions, plenary presentations
and panel discussions/debates of selected topics and submissions.
These venues will enable attendees
to understand and thoroughly analyze these key issues, towards the
goal of producing a catalog of "patterns" of -ility properties,
benefits, costs, interactions, forces, and tradeoffs.
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 4-6 page position paper in PDF format, no
later than january 27, 2006. Submission is by email to
splat@cs.utwente.nl.
The position papers will be reviewed by a program committee. Submitted
papers will be treated as confidential during the review process.
Important Dates
Submission Deadline: january 27, 2006
Notification: february 10, 2006
Organizers
Lodewijk Bergmans (University of Twente)
Johan Brichau (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Erik Ernst (University of Aarhus)
SPLAT2006 is supported by
European Network of
Excellence on Aspect-Oriented Software Development
Previous Workshops
Maintained by the
SPLAT
Organizing Committee.
|
