Call For Papers

Important dates

  • Submissions due: January 31st, 2008 (23:59 Apia Samoa time)
  • Author Notification: February 15th, 2008
  • AOSD Early registration deadline: February 25th, 2008
  • Final version due: March 14th, 2008
  • Workshop: April 1st, 2008

Scope

The tendency to raise the abstraction level in programming languages towards a particular domain is also a major driving force in the research domain of aspect-oriented programming languages. As a matter of fact, pioneering work in this field was conducted by devising small domain-specific aspect languages (DSALs) such as COOL for concurrency management and RIDL for serialization, RG, AML, and others. After a dominating focus on general-purpose languages, research in the AOSD
community is again taking this path in search of innovative approaches, insights and a deeper understanding of fundamentals behind AOP. Based on the successful DSAL06 and DSAL07 workshops, and the special issue of IET Software journal on Domain-Specific Aspect Languages, this workshop series continues to support a growing trend in AOSD research.

The workshop aims to bring the research communities of domain-specific language engineering and domain-specific aspect design together. In the previous successful editions held at GPCE06/OOPSLA06 and AOSD07 we approached domain-specific aspect languages both from a design and a language implementation point of view. New for this edition is that we explicitly invite contributions of work on adding domain-specific extensions (DSXs) to general-purpose aspect languages (GPALs).  The focus on language embedding raises specific issues for language designers, such as proper symbiosis between, and composition of, DSXs.

The distinction between the DSAL ans SPLAT workshops is that DSAL explicitly concentrates on domain-specific language features and language-extensions. The SPLAT workshop focuses more on the software engineering properties and the trade-offs in the design of aspect languages.

Topics

We seek contributions related to domain-specific aspect languages, more particularly (but not limited to):

  • design of DSALs and DSXs
  • successful DSALs, DSXs and their applications
  • issues in both design and implementation of DSALs and DSXs
  • methodologies and tools suitable for creating DSALs and DSXs
  • semantics and composition of DSALs and DSXs
  • disciplined approaches for invasive metaprogramming
  • error reporting in DSALs and debugging of DSALs
  • approaches for composable language embeddings
  • mechanisms for interaction detection and handling in DSALs
  • theoretical foundations for DSALs
  • analysis about the specificity spectrum in aspect languages
  • key challenges for future work in the area

A good analysis of conflicting forces is at least as useful for potential participants of this workshop as descriptions of original new approaches or experience reports.

Submissions

The workshop accepts three types of submissions: work-in-progress papers, position papers, and technical papers.

Papers should be formatted in SIGPLAN proceedings style (sigplanconf.cls). Page limit is strict, and depends on the type of submission: 4 pages for work-in-progress and position papers, 7 pages for technical papers. Font size must be at least 9pt.

The submission should be sent in PDF format by email to jfabry @ dcc . uchile . cl clearly indicating the type of submission.

Format of the workshop

The format of the workshop will echo the format used in DSAL'06 and '07:

A number of plenary sessions will first be held, according to grouping of accepted papers, consisting of (1) brief presentations of selected papers, (2) a discussion with the presenting authors including participation from the audience.

Second, interactive group work will be performed to identify relevant issues in the domain and possible ways to address them.

Publication

All accepted papers will be published in the ACM digital library. They will also be made available on this website prior to the workshop so that participants can read them.

Program Committee

Martin Bravenboer (Delft University, The Netherlands)
Thomas Cleenewerck (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Johan Fabry (University of Chile, Chile)
Julia Lawall (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Anne-Francoise Le Meur (University of Lille, France)
Marjan Mernik (University of Maribor, Slovenia)
Jacques Noyé (Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France)
Damijan Rebernak (University of Maribor, Slovenia)