Methods and tools for OO framework development and specialization

OOPSLA 2000 Workshop, Sunday Oct 15

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Themes and Goals

Object-oriented frameworks have become a popular form of reusable software. In particular, frameworks are exploited as architectural backbones of product families. Individual members of a product family can be obtained as specializations of a framework, using inheritance, object creation and composition, parameterization, interface implementations, and instantiations of generic structures. Frameworks typically make use of and can be documented with design patterns. Frameworks can provide an infrastructure for a set of compatible components, and a customizable component can be implemented as a framework. To some extent, a framework can be compared to a domain-oriented language: it models a particular domain and allows the specification of applications within this model.

Although frameworks are recognized as one of the main architectural techniques supporting reusability, relatively little is known about the design, documentation and specialization methodologies for frameworks, and indeed about the character of a framework as a generic software unit. Consequently, tool support for these tasks is practically non-existent, or used only in an academic context. However, research in these directions is quite strong, and many promising results have been presented.

The purpose of the workshop is to study the existing approaches to characterize, design, document and specialize frameworks, to provide supporting tools, and to obtain thus an understanding of the state of the art in this area. New ideas pertaining to this area are presented and compared with existing work. Areas of interest of this one day long workshop include, but are not limited to:
 

• characterization and classification criteria of frameworks
• understanding, specifying and documenting frameworks
• domain modeling
• framework design methodologies
• frameworks and domain-oriented languages
• different framework architectures
• frameworks and design patterns
• evaluating framework architectures
• testing frameworks
• specializing frameworks
• use of frameworks as components
• component frameworks
• frameworks and product lines
• framework visualization

• tool support for the above activities
• experiences of frameworks

How to participate

Each participant is expected to submit a position paper (max 6 pages) in advance, and only those with an accepted paper may attend the workshop. The presentations are organized into 3-4 theme sessions. Each speaker of a session is given max 10 min to present the main idea of the paper as an opening statement of the session. After the opening statements the speakers form a panel, and the session continues with discussion on preprepared themes. Participants are chosen by the organizing committee, based on the relevance of their position papers to the workshop theme.

Please send your position paper in electronic form to Kai Koskimies, kk@cs.tut.fi before September 1, 2000.

Deadlines

Position paper (max. 6 pages):    September 1, 2000
Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2000

Organizers

Prof. Jan Bosch
University of Karlskrona/Ronneby
Email: Jan.Bosch@ipd.hk-r.se

Prof. Kai Koskimies
Tampere University of Technology
Email: kk@cs.tut.fi

Prof. Hanspeter Mössenböck
University of Linz
Email: moessenboeck@ssw.uni-linz.ac.at

Prof. Wolfgang Pree
University of Constance
Email: pree@acm.org