AOMD05 Proceedings

ACM / IFIP / USENIX
6^thInternational Middleware Conference
November 28^th -- December 2^nd, Grenoble, France

1^st International Workshop on Aspect-Oriented Middleware Development (AOMD05) Proceedings

Workshop Chairs Foreword

In middleware development, numerous concerns must be taken into account and integrated together, as transparently as possible for the final applications that use the middleware layer. Because of their capability to separate concerns, Aspect Oriented languages and frameworks (more generally Aspect Oriented Software Development – AOSD) have been recognized to be a promising technique for middleware developments. Thanks to AOSD, important middleware concerns such as security, distribution, persistence, transaction, and resource localization, can be programmed within separated modules (aspects), which can then be integrated through a weaving process.

This first edition of the workshop on Aspect-Oriented Middleware Development (AOMD’05) focuses on identifying and refining the AOSD techniques that can be used during middleware development. It tackles questions such as what are the right abstractions, APIs, development methods, reasoning systems, and tools for building the next generation of aspect-oriented middleware? How and why can they be better than classical middleware implementation? What are the direct and less direct applications of AOSD in middleware? Also, the workshop aims to discuss some fundamental questions, such as the relationship between AOP and reflection, and how they compete or complement. Several papers address these issues in a sensible way.

The overall workshop discussion takes place around three main sessions presenting carefully selected work related to middleware and AOSD.

The framework session aims to reflect upon AOSD frameworks and how they can be useful to build and integrate middleware components. It focuses on the techniques and languages constructs for building these frameworks. In particular, it points out how the annotation mechanism available within the .NET and Java 5 platforms can be efficiently used for configuring the weaving of the aspects, and how the aspects can be better integrated in existing languages by using this mechanism. The work presented in this session also gives a first insight of how aspects and reflection can be used together to implement efficient AOSD frameworks.

The dynamic AOP session investigates the potential use of AOSD for implementing dynamically adaptable middleware components and layers. This section is of particular interest for building open and context-aware middleware where the applications or the middleware layers need to change their implementation and even their functional behavior to deal with new external constraints, which can appear during the system’s execution. With dynamic AOP and the work presented in this session, new concerns can be added on the fly, without having to stop the system. There are several possible application domains to these AOP-based techniques, such as ubiquitous computing. As the first session talked about AOP and reflection, this section also studies the inherent interrelationships between AOP and reflection, here applied to implementing dynamic AOP.

Finally, the applications session focuses on some examples of AOSD for more domain-specific middleware-level concerns and services. Concerns such as workflow management, availability, and access rights and policies are particularly studied.

Renaud Pawlak
INRIA Futurs, LIFL, France
renaud.pawlak@inria.fr

Rémi Douence
Obasco EMN/INRIA, LINA, France
Remi.Douence@emn.fr

Program Committee

Shigeru Chiba, TIT, Japan
Michael Eichberg, TUD, Germany
Michael Haupt, TUD, Germany
Günter Kniesel, Bonn University, Germany
David Lorenz, Northeastern University, USA
Mónica Pinto, University of Málaga, Spain
Peter Van Roy, UCL, Belgium
Lionel Seinturier, LIFL/INRIA & LIP6, France
Eddy Truyen, KUL, Belgium
Wim Vanderperren, VUB, Belgium
Houman Younessi, RPI, USA

Accepted papers

Using Aspects for Integrating a Middleware for Dynamic Adaptation
G. Vaysse, F. André, J. Buisson

XF-AOF - Lightweight Aspects for Space-Based Computing
E. Kühn, F. Schmied

AOSD for Internet Service Cluster: the Case of Availability
S.Bouchenak, N. De Palma, S. Fontaine, B. Tête

An Aspect-based Process Container for BPEL
A.Charfi, M. Mezini

Implementing a Modular Access Control Service to Support Application-Specific Policies in CaesarJ
T. Verhanneman, F. Piessens, B. De Win, E. Truyen, W. Joosen

Spoon: Annotation-Driven Program Transformation - the AOP Case
R. Pawlak

Reflection and AOP meet again: Runtime Reflective Mechanisms for Dynamic Aspects
N. Bencomo, G. Blair, G. Coulson, P. Grace, A. Rashid

Edited by Ackbar Joolia & Sébastien Jean, November 2005