Call for Papers

Seminal work on AOSD proposed a number of domain-specific aspect languages, such as COOL for concurrency management and RIDL for serialization, RG, AML, and others. For many years now, research in the AOSD community has strived to crystallize and generalize these ideas in the form of general-purpose aspect languages (e.g. AspectJ). A growing trend of research in the AOSD community is returning  to  this seminal work, as witnessed by the increasing number of recent  
proposals in the area.

This special issue addresses domain-specific aspect languages both from a domain-specific language engineering point of view, and from the view point of design and implementation of new domain-specific aspect languages, as well as composition at all levels (from design to implementation) of these languages or individual features.

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

     * successful DSALs and their applications
     * trade-offs in DSAL design
       (expressiveness, conciseness, specificity, etc.)
     * methodologies and tools suitable for implementing DSALs
     * mechanisms for interaction detection and handling in DSALs
     * theoretical foundations for DSALs

This special issue of the IET Software journal (formerly IEE Software) builds upon the successful editions of the DSAL workshop, held in 2006 at the ACM GPCE conference (DSAL 2006) and in 2007 at the ACM AOSD conference (DSAL 2007).


Submission information

Selected authors from the DSAL 2006 2007 workshops were invited to submit an extended version of their workshop paper. The call is also open to external contributions.

The extended versions of DSAL workshop papers are subjected to full re-review and should be non-trivially extended from the version that appeared in the workshop. As a rough guide, authors should ensure that the extended paper contains, at a very minimum 30% new material. We also expect a brief note to accompany the submission that explains the manner in which the extended version of the paper does, indeed, constitute an extension of the original version, pointing out, for example, areas where new text or results have been included, where text has been re-written and where extra depth is provided.

Authors are expected to follow the IET Software guidelines regarding style and length of submissions. In short: 
     
  • Authors can submit reasonably long papers (e.g. over 20 pages) if they want to. The IET page mentions a maximum number of 10.000 words, which is about 25 pages. The length specifications given on the IET page are purely indicative.
  • Authors are free to use any style conforming to the indications of the IET page. The most important note is: "Papers must be typed in a font size no smaller than 10 pt, and presented in single column format with double line spacing on one side A4 paper. All pages should be numbered. Authors should not copy the format of the published journal. All accepted papers will be edited into the IET Research Journals house-style." 
How to submit

Authors can submit their papers via manuscript central using the following link http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/iet/sen
 
Once papers are submitted they are assigned a unique reference number that we can use to track the paper through the review process. Authors can view the status of their submission through their author centre, the system has reminders set at key points in the review process.
 
Authors will need to create a new account (unless they already have one) after clicking this link and follow the submission process to complete the relevant fields and upload their paper. Authors must click ‘yes’ to the special issue question in the submission pages and enter the title of the issue 'IET Special Edition on Domain-Specific Aspect Languages'.