CFP:
SPLAT!
Software-engineering Properties of Languages for Aspect Technologies

The ultimate goal of aspect-oriented languages and systems is to improve the quality of software by enhancing software engineering properties such as modularity, comprehensibility, evolvability, composability, analyzability, etc. Consequently, each feature included in an aspect-oriented language is intended to promote certain good software engineering properties.

Yet the design of aspect-oriented languages and systems is much more complex than it appears from examining a language construct or system feature in isolation. Each feature entails a tradeoff among different software engineering properties---e.g., power vs. comprehensibility, flexibility vs. analyzability, complexity vs. evolvability. Moreover, individual features may interact in beneficial or undesirable ways, resulting in either improvement or loss of the software engineering abilities targeted by each feature.

• Novel aspect language and system design, along with an analysis of the software engineering properties it promotes or hinders
• Experience reports or motivated counter examples demonstrating the software engineering drawbacks of existing approaches to AOSD or techniques used in AOSD approaches
• Identification, analysis and examples of composability and interoperability problems in AOSD languages and systems
• Novel solutions promoting composability and interoperability of language constructs and features in AOSD systems
• Identification, analysis, and examples of explicit language support for dynamic aspects, along with their impact on other software engineering properties and language features
• Impact of implementation issues upon language design

This workshop will advance the field of AOSD language design by emphasizing the need to understand the practical consequences of design decisions on the software engineering properties of aspect-oriented software. In particular, it will help language designers understand and evaluate the tradeoffs entailed by aspect language features, and address the need for consistent language design with respect to composability of language constructs and features.

The workshop will contain both plenary sessions and work in subgroups. The organizers will select topics for breakout groups based on areas of interest identified from the position papers. The plenary sessions will either include short presentations of some selected submissions, if they raise appropriate topics for discussion, or panels discussing topics raised by the participants' submissions. Plenary sessions will only be organized if they are likely to spark discussions or stimulate the work of the subgroups. At the end of the workshop, representatives of the subgroups will present the results of their groupwork to all participants.

In preparation of the workshop groups will be formed, and participants will be stimulated to interact, particularly within each group.

After the workshop we will produce a workshop report, containing summaries of the presentations and plenary discussions, and possibly of the discussions in the breakout subgroups, if the participants of the workshop are willing to contribute to such a report.

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 Postscript, PDF, Microsoft Word, or plain ASCII format, by email to splat03@cs.utwente.nl, no later than January 31, 2003.

Submissions will be required to be strongly focused on the selected topics/issues, and they must evaluate the positive and negative effects on software engineering properties of the proposed or existing features and/or their interactions. The submissions will be reviewed by a program committee (TBA).

Important Dates

NB: Because of several requests for deadline extension, we have postponed the position paper submission deadline until January 31. The table below has been adjusted to show this. Notification of acceptance will be given by Feb. 10 as indicated, but because of the extended deadline we can only promise to deliver a brief yes/no notification by Febr. 10, with more detailed comments delayed a few days after that.

If you have already submitted a paper and wish to use the extra four days to work some more on it, please notify us. You may then re-submit by the extended deadline.