SAC 2006 Track on Programming for Separation of Concerns

Federico Bergenti Parma University, Italy
Walter Cazzola Milano University, Italy
Shigeru Chiba
Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Yvonne Coady Victoria University, Canada
Angelo Corsaro Selex SI, Italy
Hector Duran Limon
Monterrey Institute of Technology, Mexico
Marco Fargetta Catania University, Italy
Ira Forman IBM, Austin USA
Marc-Olivier Killijian LAAS-CNRS, France
Maciej Koutny Newcastle University, UK
Joe Loyall BBN Technologies, USA
Hidehiko Masuhara Tokyo University, Japan
Awais Rashid Lancaster University, UK
Douglas C. Schmidt
Vanderbilt University, USA
Robert Stroud Newcastle University, UK
Francois Taiani Lancaster University, UK
Eric Tanter University of Chile, Chile
Nalini Venkatasubramanian
California University, Irvine, USA
Stephen Vinoski Iona Technologies, USA
Nanbor Wang Tech-X Corporation, USA

Motivation

Complex systems are intrinsically expensive to develop because several concerns must be addressed simultaneously. Once the development phase is over, these systems are often hard to reuse and evolve because their concerns are intertwined and making apparently small changes force programmers to modify many parts. Moreover, legacy systems are difficult to evolve due to additional problems, including: lack of a well defined architecture, use of several programming languages and paradigms, etc.

Separation of concerns (SoC) techniques such as computational reflection, aspect-oriented programming and subject-oriented programming have been successfully employed to produce systems whose concerns are well separated, thereby facilitating reuse and evolution of system components or systems as a whole. However, a criticism of techniques such as computational reflection is that they may bring about degraded performance compared with conventional software engineering techniques. Besides, it is difficult to precisely evaluate the degree of flexibility for reuse and evolution of systems provided by the adoption of these SoC techniques. Other serious issues come to mind, such as: is the use of these techniques double-edged? Can these systems suffer a ripple effect, whereby a small change in some part has unexpected and potentially dangerous effects on the whole?

Goal

The Programming for Separation of Concerns (PSC) track at the 2006 Symposium on Applied Computing aims to bring together researchers to share experiences in using SoC techniques, and explore the practical problems of existing tools, environments, etc. The track will address questions like: Can performance degradation be limited? Are unexpected changes dealt with by reflective or aspect-oriented systems? Is there any experience of long term evolution that shows a higher degree of flexibility of systems developed with such techniques? How such techniques cope with architectural erosion? Are these techniques helpful to deal with evolution of legacy systems?

Authors are invited to submit original papers. Submissions are encouraged, but not limited, to the following topics:

- Software architectures

- Configuration management systems

- Software reuse and evolution

- Performance issues for metalevel and aspect oriented systems

- Software engineering tools

- Consistency, integrity and security

- Generative approaches

- Experiences in using reflection, composition filters, aspect- and subject- orientation

- Evolution of legacy systems

- Reflective and aspect oriented middleware for distributed systems

- Formal methods for metalevel systems

Submission Guidelines

Original papers from the above mentioned or other related areas will be considered. Only full papers about original and unpublished research are sought. Parallel submission to other conferences or tracks is not acceptable.

Papers can be submitted recurring to the web or (any problem should occur) by email to Ian Welch ian@mcs.vuw.ac.nz or Emiliano Tramontana tramontana@dmi.unict.it. The subject of the email should be PSC06 Submission.

Please make sure that the authors name and affiliation do not appear on the submitted paper, but send them as a separate file.

Peer groups with expertise in the track focus area will blindly review submissions to the track. Accepted papers will be published in the annual conference proceedings.