ENST Bretagne

DAIS & FMOODS Workshop on

Communication Abstractions for
Distributed Systems
ENST, Paris, France,
** New DATE ** November 18, 2003

Abstract

As applications become increasingly distributed and networks provide more and more connection facilities, applications require more and more interconnections, thus communication takes a central part of modern systems. To tackle the communication issues, a lot of techniques and concepts have been developed in different research fields and some industrial solutions have been proposed. Over the last 15 years, the basic building blocks for distributed object systems have emerged: distributed objects, communicating with Remote Message Send (RMS), also known as Remote Method Invocation (RMI) or Location-Independent Invocation (LII). However, it has also become clear that while such abstractions are by themselves sufficient to expose the hard problems of distributed computing, they do not solve them.
Hence, since large applications parts have been underlined like databases systems or graphical user interface, the goal is to wonder, if can we say the same for the communication part of applications?
Among concerns that are related to communication abstractions we can list Security, Partial Failure, Guaranteeing Quality of Service, Run-time evolution, Meta-Object protocols, and Ordering of events. We also have identified some Communication Abstractions such as Peer-to-peer abstract data structure, or publish/subscribe variants.

For this instance of the CADS workshop we would be particularly interested in papers proposing new abstractions, specification formalisms, especially in open environments such as web services, wireless environments or ad hoc networks. 

Call for papers

We are interested in papers reporting practical experiences relating both benefits and obstacles in using communication abstractions in various application fields. The word "abstraction" should be understood as "higher level" not as "hidden and fuzzy things". Communication abstractions must be precise even if their implementation is hidden.
The main questions are what are these abstractions, how are they specified, how to implement them and finally how to use them.
At previous years workshops, we studied some problems inherent to distribution Security, Partial Failure, Guaranteeing Quality of Service, Run-Time Evolution and considered what tools an object system might supply to help address them grouping objects into components, immutable objects, application-level protocols, reflection (both introspection and reification), and event-ordering.
This year participants are invited either to consider some of these issues and propose tools more deeply, or to make this list more complete by demonstrating common needs in other distributed applications and especially in open environments such as web services, wireless environments or ad hoc networks.
Possible sub-topics include:
The goal is to define and refine abstractions that address some of these problems and other like them. What are the right abstractions, APIs, development methods, reasoning systems, and tools for building the next generation of Distributed Object Systems?
This workshop aims to foster discussion during the workshop and to avoid a mini-conference. Sessions of discussions and presentations will be grouped according to a list of selected issues raised by the position papers.
Position papers, not to exceed 6 pages in length , are solicited by September 19, 2003. Papers based on experience with the above issues are particularly welcome.
Please send positions papers electronically in PDF or Postscript format to Antoine.Beugnard@enst-bretagne.fr by 25th of September 2003. Notification of acceptance will be given by 10th of October.
A maximum of 20 participants will be selected on the basis of the submitted material. The number of participants per position paper is limited to 2.

Important Dates

Extended deadline September 25 2003 : Paper submission deadline
October 10, 2003 : Notification of acceptance
New Date !! November 18, 2003 : The workshop

Some Related Works

Other Relevant Workshops

Organizers:

Antoine Beugnard(Chair): antoine.beugnard@enst-bretagne.fr ENST-Bretagne, Brest, France
Eric Jul (Co-chair) : eric@diku.dk DIKU,  University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Monique Calisti Whitestein Technologies AG, Switzerland
Laurence Duchien Université de Lille, France
Ludger Fiege Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany
Robert Filman NASA Ames Research Center, USA
Jean-Marc Jézéquel INRIA, France
Anne-Marie Kermarrec Microsoft, UK
Salah Sadou Valoria, Universit´e de Bretagne Sud, France


Equipment:

Blackboard, paperboard, beamer and PC.

Note : Communication is considered here only among hardware or software entities, not among humans nor between human and computer.
antoine.beugnard@enst-bretagne.fr
 
last modified: octobre, 6 2003