WCOP 2003

Eighth International Workshop on Component-Oriented Programming

Monday, July 21, 2003 – At ECOOP 2003, Darmstadt, Germany (July 21-25, 2003)

 


Venue – Motivation – Topics – Participation – Accepted Position Papers – Workshop Report – Workshop Co-Organizers


Venue

17th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming

Official ECOOP information on this workshop 


Motivation

WCOP 2003 seeks position papers on the important field of component-oriented programming (COP). WCOP 2003 is the eighth 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 CORBA/CCM, COM/COM+, J2EE/EJB, and most recently .NET. After WCOP'96 focused on the fundamental terminology of COP, the subsequent workshops expanded into the many related facets of component software.

WCOP 2003 will emphasize the dynamic composition of component-based systems and component-oriented agile development processes. A typical example of dynamic, i.e. run-time, composition of systems is the notion of web-services, but also in other domains and contexts this trend can be identified. This requires clearly specified and documented contracts, standardized architectures, specifications of functional properties and other quality attributes, and mechanisms for dynamic discovery and binding of services. A service is a running instance (all the way down to supporting hardware and infrastructure) that has specific quality attributes, such as availability, while a component needs to be deployed, installed, loaded, instantiated, composed, and initialized before it can be put to actual use. The commonalities and differences between service and component composition models are interesting and a proposed focus of this workshop.

Agile development processes can benefit from component-based development in that use of existing or of-the-shelf components reduces the amount of required development effort and gives quick results early in the process. This requires deciding early in the process which specific architectures, standards, interfaces, frameworks or even components to use. Unfortunately, such early decisions contradict general agility, as promoted, for instance, by extreme programming, because reconsidering such fundamental decisions later in the development process comes at considerable cost but may be unavoidable at the same time. On the one hand, one may end up with developing a new component instead of deploying an of-the-shelf component as planned earlier. On the other hand, a chosen architecture or interface may proof inadequate later in the process, when additional requirements are considered for the first time. As a source of delay and extra cost this easily puts the entire development at risk. Can these contradictions be dealt with?

Finally, in addition to submissions addressing the themes, we explicitly solicit papers reporting on experience with component-oriented software systems in practice, where the emphasis is on interesting lessons learned, whether the actual project was a success or a failure.

To enable lively and productive discussions, the workshop will be limited to 25 participants. Depending on the submitted position papers, the workshop will be organized into three or four subsequent mini-sessions, each initiated by a presentation of two or three selected positions and followed by discussions.

Position papers will be formally reviewed, each by at least two independent reviewers. As an incentive for submission of high quality statements, the best position statements will be combined with transcripts of workshop results and published.

Topics

Topics of interest to WCOP 2003 include, but are not limited to:

·         dynamic composition of component-based systems

·         component-oriented agile development processes

·         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

·         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

Participation

Attendance is by invitation only; all submitters of position papers have been invited. Others who might be interested should contact Jan Bosch ( Jan.Bosch @ cs.rug.nl ).

Accepted Position Papers

All submitted position papers received at least two reviews. The following position papers were accepted by the organizers.

Zipped archive of all accepted papers.

Session 1 – Specification and Predictable Assembly

·         Towards a Standardized Specification Framework for Component Discovery and Configuration
(Sven Overhage – Augsburg U, Germany)

·         Contracts and Quality Attributes of Software Components
(Ralf H. Reussner – U Oldenburg, Germany; Iman H. Poernomo, Heinz W. Schmidt – Monash U, Australia)

·         State Information in Statically Checked Interfaces
(Franz Puntigam – Technical U Wien, Austria)

·         A Methodology for Predicting the Performance of Component-Based Applications
(Nicolae Dumitrascu, Sean Murphy, Liam Murphy – U College Dublin, Ireland)

Session 2 – MDA and Adaptation

·         Research on an MDA Based COP Approach
(Seung-Yun Lee, Oh-Cheon Kwon, Min-Jung  Kim, and Gyu-Sang Shin – Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Korea)

·         Using MDA to integrate services in component platforms
(Olivier Nano, Mireille Blay-Fornarino – Universitι de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France)

·         Dynamic Interface Adaptability in Service Oriented Software
(Abdelmadjid Ketfi, Noureddine Belkhatir – Domaine U Grenoble, France)

·         Molding Components using Program Specialization Techniques
(Gustavo Bobeff, Jacques Noyι – Ιcole des Mines de Nantes, France)

Session 3 – Separation of Concerns

·         Dynamic architectural changes for distributed services
(Paolo Falcarin, Patricia Lago, Maurizio Morisio – Politecnico di Torino, Italy)

·         Unplugging Components using Aspects
(Sergei Kojarski, David H. Lorenz – Northeastern U, USA)

·         Infrastructure-based Mediation for Enforcement of Policies in Composed and Federated Applications
(Gary Vecellio, Bill Thomas – The MITRE Corporation, USA)

·         A Flexible Framework for Adding Transactions to Components
(Marek Prochazka – INRIA Rhτne-Alpes, France)

Session 4 – Dynamic Reconfiguration

·         Enforcing Feature Set Correctness for Dynamic Reconfiguration with Symbiotic Logic Programming
(Kris Gybels – Vrije U Brussel, Belgium)

·         Component Quality Configuration: the Case of Replication
(Vania Marangozova – INRIA Rhτne-Alpes, France)

·         A Self-Optimizing Container Design for Enterprise Java Beans Applications
(Mircea Trofin, John Murphy – Dublin City U, Ireland)

·         Exploiting Protocol Information for Speeding up Runtime Reconfiguration of Component-Based Systems
(Jasminka Matevska-Meyer, Wilhelm Hasselbring, and Ralf H. Reussner – U Oldenburg, Germany)

Workshop Report

The final draft of the workshop report is now available.

Constructive feedback from participants on the accuracy of the report is still welcome (please email Clemens Szyperski).

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://research.microsoft.com/~cszypers/

Wolfgang Weck

Oberon microsystems Inc.
Technoparkstrasse 1, CH-8005 Zurich, Switzerland
E-mail: Weck @ oberon.ch

 


Clemens Szyperski – cszypers @ microsoft.com – Last modified on 21-Aug-03 – http://research.microsoft.com/~cszypers/events/WCOP2003/