CALL FOR POSITION PAPERS WCAT'05 Second International Workshop on Coordination and Adaptation Techniques for Software Entities July 25, 2005 http://WCAT05.unex.es held in conjunction with: ECOOP 2005 Conference http://2005.ecoop.org July 25-29, 2005 Glasgow, UK CONTENTS ======== * Abstract * Motivation * Topics of interest * Submission * Participation * Publication * Organizers * Important dates ************ ABSTRACT ************ Coordination and Adaptation are two key issues when developing complex distributed systems. Coordination focuses on the interaction among computational entities. Adaptation focuses on the problems raised when the interacting entities do not match properly. This is the second edition of the WCAT workshop, initiated at Oslo jointly with ECOOP 2004 (http://wcat04.unex.es). The aim of WCAT'05 is to provide a venue where researchers and practitioners on these topics can meet, exchange ideas and problems, identify some of the key issues related to coordination and adaptation, and explore together and disseminate possible solutions. ************** MOTIVATION ************** In the recent years, the need for more and more complex software, supporting new services and for wider application domains, together with the advances in middleware technologies, have promoted the development of distributed systems. These applications are constituted by a collection of interacting entities (either considered as subsystems, modules, objects, components, or more recently web services) that collaborate to provide some functionality. One of the most complex tasks when designing and constructing distributed systems is not only to specify and analyze the coordinated interaction that occurs among the computational entities, but also to be able to enforce them out of a set of already implemented the computational entities. This fact has favoured the development of a specific field in Software Engineering devoted to the coordination of software. Such discipline, covering Coordination Models and Languages, promotes the re-usability both of the coordinated entities, and also of the coordination patterns. In fact, the ability of reusing existing software has always been a major concern of Software Engineering, being at the root of the so-called Component-Based Software Development. The paradigm "write once, run forever" is currently supported by several component-oriented platforms. However, existing components are hardly reused as they are, and a certain degree of adaptation is always required. To deal with those problems, a new discipline, Software Adaptation, is emerging. Software Adaptation focuses on the problems related to reusing existing software entities when constructing a new application. It is concerned with how the functional and non functional properties of an existing software entity can be adapted to be used in a software system and, in turn, how to predict properties of the composed system by only assuming a limited knowledge of the single components computational behavior. The need for adaptation of software entities can appear at any stage of the software life-cycle, and adaptation techniques for all the stages must be provided. Anyway, such techniques must be non-intrusive, and based on specific specification languages. Adaptation languages and techniques should support automatic and dynamic adaptation, by automatic and transparent procedures. For that purpose Software Adaptation promotes the use of software adaptors ---specific computational entities for solving these problems. The main goal of software adaptors is to guarantee that software components will interact in the right way not only at the signature level of traditional IDLs, but also at the protocol, Quality of Service and semantic levels. ********************** TOPICS OF INTEREST ********************** The topics of interest of WCAT'05 cover a number of fields where coordination and adaptation have an impact: models, requirements identification, interface specification, extra-functional properties, documentation, automatic generation, frameworks, middleware and tools, and experience reports. In particular, the topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Coordination Models separating the interaction concern. * Identification and specification of interaction requirements and problems. * Automatic generation of adaptors. * Dynamic versus static adaptation. * Documenting components to enable software composition and adaptation. * Behavioural interfaces, types, and contracts for components, coordinators and adaptors. * Formal/rigorous approaches to software adaptation. * The role of adaptation in the software life-cycle. * Patterns and frameworks for component look-up and adaptation. * Metrics and prediction models for software adaptation. * Prediction of the impact of software adaptation on Quality of Service (QoS). * Extra-functional properties and their relation to coordination and adaptation * Aspect-oriented approaches to software adaptation and coordination. * Coordination and adaptation middleware. * Tools and environments. * Coordination and adaptation in concurrent and distributed object-oriented systems. * Interface and choreography description of Web-Services. * Using adaptors for legacy system integration. * Industrial and experience reports. * Surveys and case studies ************** SUBMISSION ************** To enable lively and productive discussions, attendance will be limited to 20 participants, and submission of a short position paper is required. Position papers should be five or six A4 pages long in LNCS format, and include the authors' names, affiliations and contact details. They should be submitted by e-mail as postscript or PDF files before May 15, 2005 to the organizers of the workshop. Position papers should make clear the author's knowledge and experience in the field of coordination and adaptation of software. However, submissions should not take the form of full or technical papers describing authors' research and their results. On the contrary, submissions should present the state-of-the-art in this field, address open issues, state the point of view of the authors and theirs proposals (probably including a succinct description of the technical means being used), and reference relevant work in the field, by the authors themselves or by others. Description of work-in-progress, open questions and participants' expectations on the workshop is strongly encouraged. Position papers should also contain a specific final section identifying Open Issues in the fields of Coordination and/or Adaptation. All selected papers will be made available in the website of the workshop. Participants should read them prior to the workshop to foster a lively discussion and improve the productivity. ***************** PARTICIPATION ***************** Participants will make a five-minutes presentation of their positions, followed by a round of questions and discussion on participants positions. From these presentations, a list of open issues in the field will be identified and gathered. This will make the participants interests clear, and will also serve to establish the issues of the workshop. Then, participants will be divided into small groups (4-5 persons each), attending to their interests. The task of each group will be to discuss about a subset of the previously identified issues. Finally, a plenary session will be held, in which each group will present their conclusions to the rest of the participants. *************** PUBLICATION *************** The position papers accepted will be collected as a technical report by the Universities of the organizers, and distributed among the participants of the workshop. Additionally, the ECOOP Workshop Reader, traditionally published in LNCS, will include a report on this workshop, providing a summary of the workshop with the major issues discussed, and the conclusions drawn from the discussions. Depending on the interest of the participants and the soundness of the contributions presented in the workshop, the publication of a special issue on an international scientific journal will be considered. Selected participants will be invited to submit an extended paper after the workshop, in which they may describe in length their research activities in the field, (including also more detailed technical aspects). These extended papers will go through a formal review process with an interantional scientific committee for their publication in the special issue. Extended papers from last year's edition are being published as a special issue in L'Objet. ************** ORGANIZERS ************** * Steffen Becker University of Oldenburg (DE) * Carlos Canal University of Málaga (ES) * Juan Manuel Murillo University of Extremadura (ES) * Pascal Poizat University of Evry (FR) * Massimo Tivoli University of L'Aquila (IT) ******************* IMPORTANT DATES ******************** Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2005 Notification of acceptance: June 10, 2005 Camera-Ready: July 10, 2005 Workshop: July 25, 2005 For more information, visit the website: http://wcat05.unex.es