ECOOP / Workshop 12

Third International Workshop on Composition Languages

Abstract

A component-based software engineering approach mainly consists of two development steps: (i) the specification and implementation of components and (ii) the composition of components into composites or applications. Currently, there is considerable experience in component technology and many resources are spent for the first step, which resulted in the definition of component models and components such as CORBA, COM, JavaBeans, and more recently EJB and .NET. However, much less effort is spent in investigating appropriate techniques that allow application developers to express applications flexibly as compositions of components on an architectural level. Existing composition environments mainly focus on special application domains and offer at best rudimentary support for the integration of components that were built in a system other than the actual deployment environment.

To foster an even better understanding of the particular nature of composition languages, in this workshop we want to focus mainly on representation strategies for architectural software assets. There is one aspect that we want to stress in particular:

In the recent past we observed a paradigm shift from component-centric development to model-centric and architecture-centric development. One of the recent developments in this area is the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) defined by OMG. MDA is considered to be the next step in solving software integration problems. MDA introduces a separation between application logic and infrastructure by encapsulating infrastructure specific aspects as far as possible in code generators. This separation allows for the architecture specification and software composition on a conceptual level and thus reduces architectural mismatches usually introduced by dependencies to infrastructure. In this workshop we will discuss the following questions: What are benefits and limits of model-centric approaches? How can we specify component behavior on a conceptual level? How can an existing set of components be integrated with model-centric approaches?

Main Topics

Suggested topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Model-centric and architecture centric development

• Support for the specification of software architectures and architectural assets
• Interoperability support
• Design and implementation strategies for cross-platform development
• Programming paradigms for software composition
• Model-centric and architecture-centric development and composition methods (e.g., MDA)
• Using existing components in model-centric and architecture-centric approaches, model extraction
• Modeling of components, specifically component behavior
• Mapping of architectural models to applications, model transformations
• Benefits of model-centric and architecture-centric approaches
• Case studies and success stories of model-centric and architecture-centric development
• Tool support for model-centric and architecture-centric development

• Representation strategies for functional and non-functional properties
• Prediction of properties of compositions from properties of the involved components
• Reasoning about correctness of compositions
• Specifying and checking of architectural guidelines

• Higher-level abstractions for composition languages
• Implementation techniques for composition languages
• Scalability and extensibility of the language abstractions
• Analysis of runtime efficiency of compositional abstractions
• Formal semantics of composition languages
• Type systems for composition languages
• Domain-specific versus general composition languages
• Case studies of composition language design
• Case studies of system development using composition languages
• Tool support for composition languages
• Taxonomy of composition languages

Paper Submission

Type of Papers	position
Formatting Size	Letter or A4 using Springer LNCS-style, no more than 8 pages
Deadlines	Submission April 25th Notification May 23th

Details

Organizers	Markus Lumpe, Iowa State University  Thomas Genssler, FZI  Jean-Guy Schneider, Swinburne University of Technology  Markus Bauer, FZI  Bastiaan Schönhage, Compuware Europe B.V.
Date Location	Tuesday, July 22st
Workshop Home Page	http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~lumpe/WCL2003
Number of participants	20-25
Rules for Attending	Paper presenters; Other persons are welcome if there is space left.
Contact Person	Markus Lumpe

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