[CfP] 2nd Post-Java Workshop

[Pascal Costanza <address@hidden>]

                     CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

2nd Workshop on Object-Oriented Language Engineering for
          the Post-Java Era: Back to Dynamicity
            (in conjunction with ECOOP2004)

         http://prog.vub.ac.be/~wdmeuter/PostJava04/


Overview

The advent of Java has always been perceived as a major breakthrough in
the realm of object-oriented languages. And to some extent it was: it
turned academic features like interfaces, garbage-collection and
meta-programming into technologies generally accepted by industry.
Nevertheless Java also acted as a brake especially to academic language
design research. Whereas pre-Java Ecoop’s and Oopsla’s traditionally
featured several tracks with a plethora of research results in language
design, more recent versions of these conferences show far less of
these. And those results that do make it to the proceedings very often
are formulated as extensions of Java. Therefore they necessarily follow
the Java-doctrine: statically typed single-inheritance class-based
languages with interfaces and exception handling.

Recent academic developments seem to indicate that a new generation of
application domains is emerging for whose development the languages
adhering to this doctrine will probably no longer be sufficient. These
application domains have recently been grouped together under the name
Ambient Intelligence (AmI). The visionary idea of AmI is that in the
future, everybody will be surrounded by a dynamically defined processor
cloud of which the applications are expected to cooperate smoothly. AmI
was put forward as a major strategic research theme by the EU’s IST
Advisory Group for the 6th Framework of the EU. Meanwhile, the first
european symposium on AmI has recently been organised and institutions
like the MIT and Phillips have published their visions on the matter.
Currently, AmI seems to group previously “unrelated” fields such as
context dependency, domotics, ubiqutous computing, mobility, intelligent
buildings and wearable hardware. Early experiments in these fields
already seem to indicate that their full development will need a new
generation of programming languages that have dedicated provisions to
deal with highly dynamic hardware and software constellations. As such,
AmI will open up a new “market” for a new generation of programming
languages which are designed to write software that is expected to
operate in extremely dynamic hardware and software configurations. In
the past, lots of languages answering this profile have been
investigated. Examples are Lisp, CLOS, Scheme, Self, Smalltalk and loads
of less well-known academic languages. Give the new constellation
outlined above, we believe there is a new future for languages like
this. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in
object-oriented language design who adhere language features and
languages that do not follow the current Java doctrine but adhere more
“dynamic features”.

Suggested Topics

We selected dynamicity as required by the AmI vision as the common theme
of the workshop, i.e. a new context in which we can talk about
object-oriented language features of the future. We expect both position
papers that address new languages and features, as well as papers that
put old language features in this context. Topics of interest may be
(but are not limited to):

  - agent languages
  - distributed languages
  - actors, active objects
  - delegation
  - mixins
  - prototypes
  - multi-paradigm
  - reflection and meta-programming
  - mobile languages
  - (distributed/mobile) virtual machines
  - ... other exotic dynamic features which you would categorize as OO.

Important Dates

  - Call for Papers: March 1, 2004
  - Position paper due: April 5, 2004
  - Notification of acceptance: April 26, 2004
  - Workshop: June 14 or 15, 2004