First AOSD Workshop on Aspects, Components, 
and Patterns for Infrastructure Software

April 23, 2002

Enschede, The Netherlands

A one-day workshop to be held in conjunction with the 
First International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD 2002)
April 22-26, 2002, Enschede, The Netherlands 



Call For Papers

Aspect-oriented programming, component models, and design patterns are modern and actively evolving techniques to improving the modularization of complex software. In particular, these techniques hold great promise for the development of ``systems infrastructure'' software, e.g., application servers, middleware, virtual machines, compilers, operating systems, and other software that provides general services for higher-level applications. The developers of infrastructure software are currently faced with increasing demands from application programmers needing higher-level support for application development. Meeting these demands requires careful use of software modularization techniques, since infrastructural concerns are notoriously hard to modularize.

Aspects, components, and patterns provide very different means to deal with infrastructure software, but despite their differences, they have much in common. For instance, component models try to free the developer from the need to deal directly with services like security or transactions. These are primary examples of crosscutting concerns, and modularizing such concerns are the main target of aspect-oriented languages. Similarly, design patterns like Visitor and Interceptor facilitate the clean modularization of otherwise tangled concerns.

This workshop aims to provide a highly interactive forum for researchers and developers to discuss the application of and relationships between aspects, components, and patterns within modern infrastructure software. The goal is to put aspects, components, and patterns into a common reference frame and to build connections between the software engineering and systems communities. Suggested topics for position papers include, but are not restricted to:

Agenda

 Our goal is to have fruitful discussions. Each of the papers chosen for presentation will have two assigned commentators from the program committee that will be responsible for triggering the discussion after the presentation by shortly summarizing what they like and dislike about the paper and to make very detailed comments on the paper. The underlying idea is to help people improve their papers and ideas via the discussion with the others and on the other side to give a broader audience a better understanding of the ideas in the paper. Each presentation will have 5 - 20 min, depending on the content and the quality of the paper.  This is a little bit in the vein of ``writers workshops" as for example successfully applied at EuroPlop conferences. If necessary, we will split in groups based on the topics of interest in order to have parallel presentations.

 The last session of the workshop will be 1 hour relaxed coffee time where people should form groups of two or three based on their interests to discuss about topics they find interesting.

Submission Guidelines

Position papers should be 3-6 pages. All papers must be submitted electronically in PDF, Postscript or MS Word format. The papers should be emailed to: aosd-submit@ccs.neu.edu. Paper submissions will be reviewed by the program committee using criteria appropriate to their category. The submitted papers will be evaluated based on their originality, relevance, technical quality and presentation.

All accepted papers will be posted at this workshop website prior to the workshop date to give all participants the opportunity to read them before the workshop. In addition, the accepted papers will be published in a Workshop Proceedings as a University of British Columbia technical report.

Important Dates

Position Papers

Sixteen position papers have been accepted. They can be downloaded here. The position papers have also been published as a UBC Technical Report. All participants are encouraged to read the position papers before the workshop.

Workshop Organizers

Yvonne Coady is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia.  Yvonne is advised by Gregor Kiczales, and her PhD research is focused on the implementation of aspects within operating systems.  To support this research, Yvonne is one of the primary developers of AspectC, a language and compiler based on the well-known AspectJ language.  Previously, Yvonne did work in other areas of systems development, including adaptive concurrency control mechanisms and the implementation of global memory management in workstation clusters.  Yvonne also taught Computer Science full time in a small college for 7 years before starting her PhD.

Eric Eide is a Research Associate staff member with the Flux Systems Research Group in the University of Utah School of Computing.  Eric's current research is focused on tools and techniques for integrated component-based and aspect-oriented programming of operating systems and middleware.  The Flux Group's component tools include Knit, a component definition and linking language for C code, and Jiazzi, a similar language for Java.  Previously, Eric was the primary implementor of Flick, a flexible and optimizing IDL compiler that was used to produce CORBA-based stubs for use within a research operating system.  Eric has worked with the Flux Group for over five years and holds a MS degree in CS.  Eric is a member of the AOSD '02 program committee.

David H. Lorenz is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University. He has a Ph.D. from the Technion--Israel Institute of Technology. Prof. Lorenz's research interests include concepts of software components, with special interest in adaptive components and component-based design (particularly JavaBeans technology). He teaches courses in Programming Languages, Object-Oriented Design, and Component-Based Programming. He has served on the program committees of International Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems Europe Conferences (TOOLS Europe 2000: Enterprise Architecture, Patterns, Components; and TOOLS Europe 2001: Components for Mobile Computing). He is a member of editorial board of International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making, World Scientific Publishing Co.

Mira Mezini is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Darmstadt University of Technology. She has her Ph.D. from the University of Siegen. Prof. Mezini's research interests include  the design and implementation of languages with powerful modularization capabilities, design patterns and frameworks, component-oriented programming, component-based software development, etc. She teaches courses on advanced object-oriented design with patterns and frameworks, component technology, software composition, software engineering, etc. She has served on the program committees of several conferences, such as TOOLS Europe '99, ECOOP 2001, ECOOP 2002, Aspect-Oriented Software Development 2002, Component Deployment 2002 etc

Klaus Ostermann is a PhD student at Siemens Corporate Technology and Darmstadt University of Technology. His research focuses on developing methods, tools and languages that support programmers in writing software that has a clear modular structure and reflects a clear separation of concerns. He is currently working on language mechanisms and environments for structured and type-safe runtime composition of aspects.

Roman Pichler works for Siemens Corporate Technology. His work focuses on component-based architectures and web applications. He has been working as a developer and consultant on various projects in the semiconductor, telecommunication and medical/healthcare industry. His research interests include the relation between component models such as Enterprise JavaBean and Aspect-Oriented Programming.

Program Committee