ECOOP'2002 Workshop on

Concrete Communication Abstractions Of
The Next 701 Distributed Object Systems
University of Málaga, Spain, One Day, June 10, 2002

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 issue 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 last year's ECOOP workshop on The Next 700 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. 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 last year’s ECOOP workshops on The Next 700 Distributed Object Systems, we studied some problems inherent to distribution – Security, Partial Failure, Guaranteeing Quality of Service, Runt-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 8, 2002. 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 8th of April 2002. Notification of acceptance will be given by 29th of April. 

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 2002 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.

The papers

Injectors and Annotations by Robert E. Filman (slides ppt)
Peer Data Structures by Ulrik P. Schultz
Visibility as Central Abstraction in Event-based Systems by Ludger Fiege, Mira Mezini, Gero Muhl, and Alejandro P. Buchmann (slides ppt)
Building Distributed Collaboartion Tools Using Type-Based Publish/Subscribe by Christain Heide Damm and Klaus Marius Hensen (slides pdf)
Coordination Languages as Communication Components by Selma Matougui (slides ppt)
Abstracting Communication in Distributed Agent-Based Systems by Monique Calisti (slides ppt)
Communication Abstraction Based on Multi-Level System Description by N. Baker, Z Kovacs, G. Mathers and R. McClatchey (slides ppt)

The report will soon be here...

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
Andrew Black OGI School of Science & Engineering at OHSU, Oregon, USA
Stéphane Ducasse University of Bern, Switzerland
Laurence Duchien Université de Lille, France
José Fiadeiro ATX Software
Rachid Guerraoui Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Matti Hiltunen AT&T Labs-Research, USA. 
Jean-Marc Jézéquel INRIA, France
Anne-Marie Kermarrec Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK 
Doug Lea State University of New York at Oswego, Oswego, NY, USA
Nenad Medvidovic University of Southern California, USA
Elie Najm ENST, Paris, France
Oscar Nierstrasz Software Composition Group, Switzerland
Salah Sadou Valoria, Universit´e de Bretagne Sud, France
Christophe Sibertin-Blanc Université de Toulouse, France
Stefan Tai IBM Watson, USA

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: jan 31, 2002