WCOP 2004

Ninth International Workshop on Component-Oriented Programming

Tuesday, June 15, 2004 – WS18 at ECOOP 2004, Oslo, Norway (June 14–18, 2004)

 

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

Venue

18th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming

Official ECOOP information on this workshop

Motivation

WCOP 2004 seeks position papers on the important field of component-oriented programming (COP). WCOP 2004 is the ninth 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+, J2EE/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.

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.

After WCOP'96 focused on the fundamental terminology of COP, the subsequent workshops expanded into the many related facets of component software.

WCOP 2004 will emphasize the dynamic composition of component-based systems and component-oriented development processes, continuing this theme from the previous WCOP, which opened many interesting threads of discussion (see the ECOOP workshop reader). A relatively novel development in component-based software engineering is the late composition of component-based systems, in particular dynamically, i.e. at run-time. A typical example is the notion of web services, but also in other domains and contexts this trend can be identified. This requires that component software contain clearly specified and documented contracts, standardized architectures, specifications of functional properties and other quality attributes and mechanisms for dynamic discovery and binding. A service is a running instance (all the way down to supporting hardware and infrastructure) that has specific quality attributes, 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 is interesting and a proposed focus of this workshop.

Flexible development processes (such as the recent "agile" ones) and component-based development support each other in that use of existing or of-the-shelf components reduces the amount of required development effort. On the other hand, however, deployment of such components typically has consequences for the remainder of the system. Such decisions and documents need to be produced early in the process and changing them later comes at considerable cost, presenting a clear risk for agile development processes.

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.

One of the challenges in component-based software development is the establishment of system qualities. 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. This is especially the case when systems start to compose themselves dynamically.

Topics

Topics of interest to WCOP 2004 include, but are not limited to:

·               dynamic composition of component-based systems

·               component-oriented development processes

·               components in distributed embedded systems, including mobile phones and PDAs

·               components versus services

·               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 Clemens Szyperski.

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 – Analysis

·         Validation of context-dependent aspect-oriented adaptations to components
(Thomas Cottenier, Tzilla Elrad – Illinois IT, USA)

·         Top-down analysis for bottom-up development
(Judith A. Stafford – Tufts University, MA, USA; and John D. McGregor – Clemson U, SC, USA)

Session 2 – Performance

·         Parametric performance contracts for software components and their compositionality
(Ralf H. Reussner, Viktoria Firus, and Steffen Becker – U Oldenburg, Germany)

·         A framework for automatically detecting and assessing performance antipatterns in component based systems using run-time analysis
(Trevor Parsons – Dublin City U, Ireland; John Murphy – U College Dublin, Ireland)

Session 3 – Direction of CBSE

·         Components – the past, the present, and the future
(Jean-Guy Schneider and Jun Han – Swinburne UT, Victoria, Australia)

·         Open issues and concerns on component-based software engineering
(Stefano De Panfilis – Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A., Roma, Italy; Arne J. Berre – SINTEF, Oslo, Norway)

Session 4 – Application of CBSE

·         Software architecture description supporting component deployment and system runtime reconfiguration
(Jasminka Matevska-Meyer, Wilhelm Hasselbring, and Ralf H. Reussner – U Oldenburg, Germany)

·         Applicability of component-based development in high-performance systems
(Amir Zeid, Michael Messiha, Sami Youssef – American U Cairo, Egypt)

·         Component-based approach for embedded systems
(Ivica Crnkovic – Mδlardalen U, Vδsterεs, Sweden)

Workshop Co-Organizers

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: Wolfgang.Weck @ oberon.ch

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 – cszypers @ microsoft.com – Last modified on 8-Jun-04 – http://research.microsoft.com/~cszypers/events/WCOP2004/