Call for Position Statements and Participation WCOP 2002 Seventh International Workshop on Component-Oriented Programming (in conjunction with ECOOP'2002) Malaga, Span, June 10, 2002 MOTIVATION WCOP 2002 seeks position papers on the important field of component-oriented programming (COP). WCOP 2002 is the seventh event in a series of highly successful workshops, which took place in conjunction with every ECOOP since 1996. COP has been described as the natural extension of object-oriented programming to the realm of independently extensible systems. Several important approaches have emerged over the recent years, including component technology standards, such as CORBA/CCM, COM/COM+, JavaBeans/EJB, and most recently .NET, but also the increasing appreciation of software architecture for component-based systems, and the consequent effects on organizational processes and structures as well as the software development business as a whole. After WCOP'96 focused on the fundamental terminology of COP, the subsequent workshops expanded into the many related facets of component software. WCOP 2002 has an explicit focus on dynamic reconfiguration of component systems, that is, the overlap between COP and dynamic architectures. Also, submissions reporting on experience with component-oriented software systems in practice are strongly encouraged, where the emphasis is on interesting lessons learned, whether the actual project was a success or a failure. COP aims at producing software components for a component market and for late composition. Composers are third parties, possibly the end users, who are not able or willing to change components. This requires standards to allow independently created components to interoperate, and specifications that put the composer into the position to decide what can be composed under which conditions. On these grounds, WCOP'96 led to the following definition: A component is a unit of composition with contractually specified interfaces and explicit context dependencies only. Components can be deployed independently and are subject to composition by third parties. Often discussed in the context of COP are quality attributes (a.k.a. system qualities). A key problem that results from the dual nature of components between technology and markets are the non-technical aspects of components, including marketing, distribution, selection, licensing, and so on. While it is already hard to establish functional properties under free composition of components, non-functional and non-technical aspects tend to emerge from composition and are thus even harder to control. In the context of specific architectures, what can be said about the quality attributes of systems composed according to the architecture's constraints? TOPICS Topics of interest to WCOP 2002 include, but are not limited to: * components in distributed embedded systems, including mobile phones and PDAs * relating architectural principles/approaches to component software * addressing variability requirements in component-based solutions * system design for independent extensibility * system design for the use of third-party components * system design for hot-swappable components * interoperation among component frameworks * quality attributes * component-aware processes * declarative forms of composition/configuration * deployment attribution / constraints * component versus application evolution * domain-specific (vertical) standards * dynamic architectures * architecture description languages suitable to guide COP * performance/efficiency of component-based systems * organizational aspects * business aspects * what worked / what didn't work in practice and lessons learned SUBMISSIONS AND PARTICIPATION To enable lively and productive discussions, attendance will be limited to 25 participants. To participate in the workshop, acceptance of a submitted position statement is required and at most two authors per accepted submission can participate. All submissions will be formally reviewed. High-quality position statements will be considered for publication in conjunction with transcripts of workshop results. Authors of accepted papers need to participate in the workshop. Position statements should clearly state how they relate to the workshop theme, what particular problems they address, what solutions they envisage, and why the statement is expected to be relevant to both this workshop and the community. Statements should be four to eight pages (single-spaced A4 or letter) long and state the author's name, affiliation, and contact. Submissions should be e-mailed to Wolfgang Weck (plain ASCII, Word RTF, standard Postscript, or PDF (preferred)). IMPORTANT DATES * Paper submissions: April 8, 2002 * Notification of acceptance: April 29, 2002 (Deadline for early ECOOP registration: May 6, 2002) * Workshop handouts ready: May 31, 2002 WORKSHOP CO-ORGANIZERS Jan Bosch University of Groningen Department of Computing Science P.O. Box 800, NL9700 AV, Groningen, Netherlands E-mail Jan.Bosch@cs.rug.nl Web http://www.cs.rug.nl/~bosch Clemens Szyperski Microsoft One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98053, USA E-mail: cszypers@microsoft.com Web: http://www.research.microsoft.com/~cszypers/ Wolfgang Weck Oberon microsystems Inc. Technoparkstrasse 1 CH-8005 Zurich E-mail Weck@oberon.ch