A series of related workshops on "Composablity in OO", "Aspect-Oriented Programming" and "Aspects & Dimensions of Concerns" that have been held at ECOOP, as well as related workshops at ICSE and OOPSLA, indicate a fast growing interest in this area. Last year's ECOOP workshop titled "Aspects & Dimensions of Concerns" was considered very succesful by many people, not only because of the interest in the topic, but also since it managed to create a setting where people could really work together on example problems and requirements for this field. This year, we strive for a similar result, most likely by following a similar format.
The workshop will combine tigthly focused work in small groups with regular short plenary sessions. We require the participants to prepare the topic by (a) restricting the scope of the position papers and (b) setting up the groups and their topics before the workshop. The exact focus is yet to be determined, but we envision a followup on last years workshop results, such as the identification of the requirements and design space of solution approaches.
Separation of concerns depends on having the right modularization at the right time: the concerns that are separated must match the concerns one needs to deal with. Unfortunately, different development activities often involve concerns of different kinds. For example, changing a data representation in an object-oriented system might involve a single class, or a few closely-related classes, and might be done additively using subclassing or suitable design patterns. Here the hallmark of OO - modularization by class (or object)- is a major asset. On the other hand, adding a new feature to a system may involve invasive changes to many classes: the feature code is scattered across multiple classes, and tangled with other code within those classes. This reduces comprehensibility and increases impact of change and the likelihood of error. In short, one needs different modularizations for different purposes: sometimes by class, sometimes by feature, role, variant or others.
A series of related workshops on "Composablity in OO", "Aspect-Oriented Programming" and "Aspects & Dimensions of Concerns" that have been held at ECOOP, as well as related workshops at ICSE and OOPSLA, have addressed this matter, focusing on enhancing the functional behavior of software with systemic features. Approaches such as adaptive programming, composition filters, hyperspaces, logic meta-programming, role-modeling, subject-oriented programming, and many others presented at previous ECOOP workshops have enhanced object-oriented programming by providing separation of concerns along additional dimensions, beyond objects.
This workshop is intended to bring together researchers interested in pushing the frontier in this important and growing area, and practitioners who have experience related to (inadequate) separation of concerns. The workshop will be centered on collaborative work among the participants. The major goal of the workshop is for this community to define the requirements and the design space for approaches and solutions (TBD). In addition to this, the workshop will continue to foster new research related to separation of concerns.
Attendance to the workshop is limited to facilitate lively discussions and the exchange of ideas. Prospective participants are solicited to submit a 4-6 page position paper in Postscript, PDF, Microsoft Word, or plain ASCII format. All submissions must include the full contact information of at least one author. The submissions will be required to be strongly focused on the selected topics/issues, but there will be room for a few exceptions in the case of exciting new work. The submissions will be reviewed by the program committee in order to guarantee that the position papers are appropriate for the workshop. A small subset of accepted participants may be asked to give brief presentations of their work at the workshop, based on its suitability for raising important issues for discussion.