[TYPES/announce] CfP: RAOOL at ECOOP'09

[Stephanie Balzer]

[N.B. Poster submission open]

Call for Participation
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 modeling, 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


ACCEPTED PAPERS

Roles in Building Web Applications Using Java (long paper)
Guido Boella, Roberto Grenna, and Andrea Cerisara

Implementing Relationships among Classes of Analysis Pattern Languages 
Using Aspects (long paper)
Rosana T. Vaccare Braga and Rodrigo Henrique Roldao Marchesini

Nested and Specialized Associations (long paper)
Tormod Vaksvik Håvaldsrud and Birger Møller-Pedersen

Implementing UML Associations in Java - A Slim Code Pattern for a 
Complex Modeling Concept (long paper)
Dominik Gessenharter

Retrieving Relationships from Declarative Files (short paper)
Ciera Jaspan and Jonathan Aldrich

Implementing Relationships using Affinity (short paper)
Stephen Nelson, David Pearce, and James Noble


POSTER SUBMISSION

Prospective participants are invited to submit a poster describing raw 
ideas and/or work-in-progress. Posters should be submitted to the 
workshop chair (balzers at inf.ethz.ch) by June 15, 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)