CALL FOR PAPERS - PSC Track @ SAC 2010
The 25th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
22 - 26 March 2010, Sierre, Switzerland

Track on Programming for Separation of Concerns (PSC)
http://www.dmi.unict.it/~tramonta/PSC10/

First 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 2010 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


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

Paper Due: September 8, 2009
Author Notification: October 19, 2009
Camera Ready: November 2, 2009

All the deadlines will be strictly enforced.


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/SAC2010). Any problem should occur please email to Emiliano Tramontana (tramontana at dmi dot unict dot it).

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. At least one author of the accepted paper should register and participate in the PSC 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 the Elsevier Journal Computer Languages, Systems & Structures.

Track Co-Chairs
=================

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

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

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


For up-to-date information, please visit http://www.dmi.unict.it/~tramonta/PSC10/