Call for Papers:
Special Issue of Journal of Object Technology
associated with the SPLAT Workshop

Call for Papers

In connection with the SPLAT series of workshops, held annually in association with the AOSD conference, the Journal of Object Technology (JOT) will feature a special issue with papers that focus on software engineering properties of aspect languages. For this special issue we invite submission of high quality papers, including extended and updated versions of papers published at SPLAT in 2008 or earlier, and also including other papers with relevant topics as desribed below.

Topics

Aspect technologies such as programming languages and related systems enable programmers to do software engineering, and the most important criterion for evaluation of the quality of the design of such a language or system lies in its effect on software engineering. If a new language construct enables programmers to write better software then it is an improvement, otherwise it is not. Similar considerations apply for a new concept or feature in a language related system such as a programming environment or an analysis tool. However, it is very hard to measure whether a given proposal is an improvement, because it is not possible to write all programs in a language, or to try out all the possible organizational environments in which software may be developed. Hence, good judgment and innovative approaches are required in order to discern and justify the connection between software engineering reality and ideas generated in the scientific community. For this special issue of JOT, we particularly focus on addressing this very basic difficulty: Understanding the connection between software engineering qualities and the design choices made in languages and related systems.

In order to characterize software engineering qualities, the so-called '-ilities', e.g., comprehensibility, evolvability, modularity, and analyzability, are crucial dimensions to consider, and we expect these dimensions to play an important role in the quest for answers to this challenge. 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 also critical to understand these tradeoffs.

This special issue of JOT will explore topics in the design of AOSD languages and systems that promote good software engineering properties, e.g., with respect to analyzability, predictability, expressiveness, evolvability, and semantic interactions. The special issue aims to highlight some hard and deep issues and tradeoffs, and to try to characterize the conflicts and, to the extent possible, describe useful solutions.

The following list specifies a core subset of the topics which are relevant to this special issue:

• 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 expressivity 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 significantly reducing expressivity.
• "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.

Submission Guidelines

Submission of high quality papers to this special issue of JOT are hereby invited, including extended and updated versions of papers published at SPLAT in 2008 or earlier, and also including other papers with relevant topics as desribed above.

Submission is by email to splat@ewi.utwente.nl, no later than August 15th, 2008, midnight Samoa Apia time. Notification of acceptance is sent out on September 27th, 2008. A final version of the paper is due on October 20th, 2008.

The paper must be formatted according to the JOT style as specified on http://www.jot.fm/general/info/, with a maximum of 20 pages including references and appendices etc.

The papers will be reviewed by the program committee. Submitted papers will be treated as confidential during the review process. Submitted papers must not be published or submitted for publication elsewhere, and in particular papers published at SPLAT workshops must be extended and/or updated compared to the workshop version of the paper.

Program Committee

• Mehmet Aksit, University of Twente, Netherlands
• Lodewijk Bergmans, University of Twente, Netherlands
• Johan Brichau, Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium
• Shigeru Chiba, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
• Erik Ernst, University of Aarhus, Denmark
• Bruno De Fraine, VUB, Belgium
• Kris Gybels, VUB, Belgium
• Stephan Herrmann, TU Berlin, Germany
• Robert Hirschfeld, University of Potsdam, Germany
• Ralf Lämmel, Germany
• Istvan Nagy, ASML, Netherlands
• Klaus Ostermann, TU Darmstadt, Germany
• Kevin Sullivan, University of Virginia, USA
• Kris De Volder, University of British Columbia, Canada

• SPLAT.08
• ›› Call For Papers
• ›› Organizers
• ›› Papers
• ›› Program
• ›› JOT CFP
• AOSD.08