ENST Bretagne

ECOOP'2003 Workshop on

Communication Abstractions for
Distributed Systems
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany,
July 22, 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?
At the previous ECOOP workshops on The Next 701 Distributed Object Systems, we identified some of these problems (Security, Partial Failure, Guaranteeing Quality of Service, Run-time evolution, Meta-Object protocols, and Ordering of events) that are important concerns of any communication abstraction. Some Communication Abstractions were identified at ECOOP'2002 in Malaga such as Peer-to-peer abstract data structure, or publish/subscribe variants. The goal of this workshop is to work on the definition of new and good communication abstractions and on the distributed-specific features mentioned above.

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 and finally how to implement them. At previous year’s ECOOP workshops on The Next 701 Distributed Object Systems, 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.
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 April 25, 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 April 2003. Notification of acceptance will be given by 17th of May. 
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.
Springer-Verlag will publish the ECOOP 2003 Ws Reader as an LNCS volume. This book will include a report for each workshop. The organizers will write the report, in collaboration with the participants of the workshop. The organizers should produce a report that provides a summary of the workshop with the major issues discussed and the conclusions of the working groups (if applicable). The report should also include the current research being carried out in the area and open research directions on the workshop themes.
Best positions papers will be proposed for publication in the online IEEE Distributed Systems Online.

Important Dates

April 25, 2003 : Paper submission deadline
May 17, 2003 : Notification of acceptance
July 22, 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: feb, 7 2003