Organizers

Bedir Tekinerdogan, University of Twente

The abstraction mechanisms of most current programming languages --- subroutines, procedures, functions, objects, classes, modules and APIs --- can all be thought of as fitting into a generalized procedure call model. The design style they support is one of breaking a system down into parameterized components that can be called upon to perform a function.

But many systems have properties that don't necessarily align with the system's functional components. Failure handling, persistence, communication, replication, coordination, memory management, real-time constraints, and many others, are aspects of a system's behavior that tend to cut-across groups of functional components. While they can be thought about and analyzed relatively separately from the basic functionality, programming them using current component-oriented languages tends to result in these aspects being spread throughout the code. The source code becomes a tangled mess of instructions for different purposes.

This "tangling" phenomenon is at the heart of much needless complexity in existing software systems. It increases the dependencies between the functional components. It distracts from what the components are supposed to do. It introduces numerous opportunities for programming errors. It makes the functional components less reusable. In short, it makes the source code difficult to develop, understand and evolve.

A number of researchers have begun working on approaches to this problem that allow programmers to express each of a system's aspects of concern in a separate and natural form, and then automatically combine those separate descriptions into a final executable form using automatic tools. These approaches have been called Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP).

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners working on a wide range of AOP techniques, including languages, tools, frameworks, programming styles, etc.

A special theme of this workshop is the exploration of different visual approaches to presenting the different aspects of concern in a system. Participants are especially encouraged to pursue this in position papers.