[TYPES/announce] RAOOL at ECOOP'09: Deadline extended

[Stephanie Balzer]

[N.B. Deadline extended to April 13]

Call for Papers
2nd workshop on
Relationships and Associations in Object-Oriented Languages
RAOOL'09
co-located with ECOOP'09

http://www.lst.inf.ethz.ch/raool09/


PURPOSE

Relationships and roles are important concepts used in many areas of 
computer science (e.g., conceptual modelling, database systems, 
ontology) but are not "first-class" constructs in modern programming 
languages. In current object-oriented languages, programmers are forced 
to implement relationships or roles "by hand" (using pointers and 
collections), leading to a disconnect between models and 
implementations. This disconnect causes numerous problems across the 
software engineering life cycle: most importantly, implementations 
become cumbersome because relationships are represented by several code 
fragments, scattered throughout the application code, resulting in code 
fragility. Since current mainstream languages lack appropriate support 
for heap querying, programmers are further burdened with crafting code 
to query relationships and check their consistency. As software systems 
grow and become increasingly complex this disconnect causes problems not 
only for implementers but also for code maintainers.

In response, a growing number of researchers in the software community 
are investigating adding first-class support for relationships and heap 
queries to current programming languages. Interest in first-class 
support for such constructs is not limited to programming language 
research. Program analysis, for instance, could benefit from the 
decreased use of pointers and transparent persistence could benefit from 
explicit queries.

In this workshop, we plan to gather researchers in the programming 
language community who are working on relationship-based systems to 
share their research and to discuss the future of relationship-based 
constructs in programming languages. We are interested in input from 
members of the programming language community but also in input from 
members of related areas (e.g. databases, model-driven development) and 
domains (e.g., program analysis, orthogonal persistence, type systems) 
who are using relationships. Some particular areas of interest are:

- relationship-based programming languages
- using libraries/frameworks to support relationships
- first-class queries
- database integration
- serialization or persistence using relationships
- system and framework design using relationships
- understanding or visualizing programs
- ownership and related techniques
- dynamic analysis of relationship usage


SUBMISSIONS

Prospective participants are invited to submit a paper that should fall 
into one of two categories:

- long paper (max. 8 pages) that describes new work on the above or 
related topics

- short paper (max. 4 pages) that can describe work-in-progress, report 
on experiences gained, question accepted wisdom, raise challenging open
problems, or propose speculative new approaches

The selected papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.


IMPORTANT DATES

Submission:    April 13, 2009
Notification:  May 8, 2009
Workshop date: July 7, 2009


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Uwe Assmann (TU Dresden, Germany)
Guido Boella (University of Torino)
Achim D. Brucker (SAP Research, Germany)
Stephane Ducasse (INRIA Lille, France)
Susan Eisenbach (Imperial College London, UK)
Manuel Fahndrich (Microsoft Research, USA)
James Noble (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
David J. Pearce (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
Friedrich Steimann (Fernuniversität in Hagen, Germany)
Mandana Vaziri (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA)


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Stephanie Balzer (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
Gavin Bierman (Microsoft Research, UK)
Stephen Nelson (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
Frank Tip (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA)