Last CFP - PSC track at SAC 2009

Last CFP - PSC track at SAC 2009

[Emiliano Tramontana]

Apologise for multiple copies

The 24th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
8 - 12 March 2009, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2009

5th Edition Track on Programming for Separation of Concerns (PSC) @  
ACM SAC 2009
Home page: http://www.dmi.unict.it/~tramonta/PSC09/


Important Dates
===============

Paper Due:            August 16, 2008
Author Notification:  October 11, 2008
Camera Ready:         October 25, 2008



Call for Papers
===============

Complex systems are intrinsically expensive to develop because
several concerns must be addressed simultaneously. Once the
development phase is over, these systems are often hard to reuse and
evolve because their concerns are intertwined and making apparently
small changes force programmers to modify many parts. Moreover,
legacy systems are difficult to evolve due to additional problems,
including: lack of a well defined architecture, use of several
programming languages and paradigms, etc.

Separation of concerns (SoC) techniques such as computational
reflection, aspect-oriented programming and subject-oriented
programming have been successfully employed to produce systems whose
concerns are well separated, thereby facilitating reuse and evolution
of system components or systems as a whole. However, a criticism of
techniques such as computational reflection is that they may bring
about degraded performance compared with conventional software
engineering techniques. Besides, it is difficult to precisely
evaluate the degree of flexibility for reuse and evolution of systems
provided by the adoption of these SoC techniques.  Other serious
issues come to mind, such as: is the use of these techniques double-
edged? Can these systems suffer a ripple effect, whereby a small
change in some part has unexpected and potentially dangerous effects
on the whole?

The Programming for Separation of Concerns (PSC) track at the 2009
Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) will aim to bring together
researchers to share experiences in using SoC techniques, and explore
the practical problems of existing tools, environments, etc. The
track will address questions like: Can performance degradation be
limited? Are unexpected changes dealt with by reflective or aspect-
oriented systems? Is there any experience of long term evolution that
shows a higher degree of flexibility of systems developed with such
techniques? How such techniques cope with architectural erosion? Are
these techniques helpful to deal with evolution of legacy systems?

Submissions will be encouraged, but not limited, to the following
topics:

- Software architectures
- Software reuse and evolution of legacy systems
- Performance issues for metalevel and aspect oriented systems
- Software engineering tools
- Consistency, Integrity and Security
- Generative approaches
- Analysis and evaluation of software systems
- Practical experiences in using reflection, composition filters,
aspect- and subject- orientation
- Reflective and aspect oriented middleware for distributed systems
- Modelling of SoC techniques to allow predictable outcomes from
their use
- Formal methods for metalevel and aspect-oriented systems


Submissions guidelines
======================

Original papers from the above mentioned or other related areas will
be considered. Only full papers about original and unpublished
research are sought. Parallel submission to other conferences or
tracks is not acceptable.

Papers can be submitted recurring to the web (http://sac.cs.iupui.edu/
SAC2009/) or (any problem should occur) by email to Emiliano
Tramontana (tramontana@dmi.unict.it), the subject of the email should
be PSC Submission.

Please make sure that the authors name and affiliation do not appear
on the submitted paper.

Peer groups with expertise in the track focus area will blindly
review submissions to the track. Accepted papers will be published in
the ACM SAC conference proceedings.

The camera-ready version of the accepted paper should be prepared
using the ACM format (guidelines will be given on the SAC website).
The maximum number of pages allowed for the final papers is five (5),
with the option, at additional cost, to add three (3) more pages. A
set of papers submitted to the PSC track and not accepted as full
papers will be selected as poster papers and published in the ACM
proceedings as 2-page papers.

A selected number of the best papers accepted at the PSC track will
be invited for expansion and for a possible publication at a special
issue of a Journal.

Program Co-Chairs
=================

Yvonne Coady
Dept. of Computer Science,
University of Victoria, Canada

Corrado Santoro
Dept. of Computer Science and Mathematics,
Computer Science Faculty, University of Catania, Italy

Emiliano Tramontana
Dept. of Computer Science and Mathematics,
Computer Science Faculty, University of Catania, Italy