General talk about software patterns

[Eric Eide <eeide AT cs.utah.edu>]

                                CALL FOR PAPERS

           Fourth AOSD Workshop on Aspects, Components, and Patterns
                     for Infrastructure Software (ACP4IS)

                                March 14, 2005
                               Chicago, IL, USA
                    http://aosd.net/2005/workshops/acp4is/

             A one-day workshop to be held in conjunction with the
                      Fourth International Conference on
                Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD.05),
                      March 14-18, 2005, Chicago, IL, USA
                          http://aosd.net/conference


The importance of "systems infrastructure" software --- including application
servers, virtual machines, middleware, compilers, and operating systems --- is
increasing as application programmers demand better and higher-level support
for software development.  Vendors that provide superior support for
application development have a competitive advantage.  The software industry 
as
a whole benefits as the base level of abstraction increases, thus decreasing
the need for application programmers to continually "reinvent the wheel."

These trends, however, mean that the demands on infrastructure software are
increasing.  More and more features and requirements are being "pushed down"
into the infrastructure, and the developers of systems software need better
tools and techniques for handling these increased demands.  In particular,
developers need better techniques for modularizing, combining, and analyzing
the many features that are now being demanded from infrastructure software.

This meeting of the ACP4IS workshop will focus on the particular topic of
implementing infrastructure software product families.  A software product
family is a group of systems, designed around a shared set of features and
implemented using a common set of parts.  Each member of a family is
implemented as a unique assembly or configuration of parts; as a result,
different family members have different feature sets.  Aspects, components, 
and
patterns have all been used to implement software product families.  The goal
of this year's workshop is to better understand how these techniques relate,
individually and in combination, to the inherent challenges of systems
infrastructure product families.  Critical issues include untangling the
inherent complexity of infrastructure software; obtaining strong assurances of
correct and predictable behavior; achieving maximum run-time performance; and
dealing with the large body of existing systems software components.  
Suggested
topics for position papers include, but are not restricted to:

  * Feature-oriented design and implementation of infrastructure software
  * Relationships between features and aspects
  * Novel approaches for dealing with conflicting features
  * Support for fine-grain trade-offs between features
  * Advances in representing, managing, and modularizing emergent system
    properties
  * Application- or domain-specific optimization of family-based systems
  * Software product lines for resource-constrained and embedded systems
  * Testing and validation across members of an infrastructure product family
  * Issues in systems that support dynamic feature selection
  * Techniques for particular concerns in infrastructure product families,
    e.g., security and real-time
  * Methods and tools for aspect-oriented product family design and
    implementation
  * Quantitative and qualitative evaluations of product families

AGENDA

The workshop will be structured to encourage fruitful discussions and build
connections between workshop participants.  To this end, approximately half of
the workshop time will be devoted to short presentations of accepted papers,
with the remaining half devoted to semi-structured discussion groups.  To help
ensure focused discussions, participants will be expected to read accepted
papers and submit written comments on some of those papers prior to the
workshop.  Participants will work with the workshop organizers prior to the
workshop to establish topics for discussion groups.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Invitation to the workshop will be based on accepted position papers, 3-6 
pages
in length.  All papers must be submitted electronically in PDF, Postscript, or
MS Word format.  Papers should be submitted via the workshop's Web site.  
Paper
submissions will be reviewed by the workshop program committee and designated
reviewers.  Papers will be evaluated based on technical quality, originality,
relevance, and presentation.

All accepted papers will be posted at the workshop Web site prior to the
workshop date, to give all participants the opportunity to read them before 
the
workshop.  The accepted papers will also be published in a Workshop 
Proceedings
as a technical report.

IMPORTANT DATES

  Submission Deadline:          January 13, 2005
  Notification of Acceptance:   February 3, 2005
  Workshop:                       March 14, 2005

WORKSHOP PROGRAM COMMITTEE

  Yvonne Coady, University of Victoria
  Adrian Colyer, IBM UK
  Eric Eide, University of Utah
  Erik Hilsdale, Google
  Hans-Arno Jacobsen, University of Toronto
  Ray Klefstad, University of California, Irvine
  Julia Lawall, DIKU
  David H. Lorenz, Northeastern University
  Martin Robillard, McGill University
  Christa Schwanninger, Siemens AG
  Yannis Smaragdakis, Georgia Tech
  Olaf Spinczyk, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
  Rob van Ommering, Philips
  (Additional members pending.)

WORKSHOP ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

  Yvonne Coady, University of Victoria
  Eric Eide, University of Utah
  David H. Lorenz, Northeastern University
  Olaf Spinczyk, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg