A seminar for the junior members in the team will be held Feb 19 and 20, 2007 at the VUB.

The schedule of the seminar is as follows:

Day 1: Feb 19, VUB Building D, 1st floor. Room D1.08

8:59 - 10:20

Travel Time

10:20 - 10:40

Coffee Break

10:40 - 10:50

Welcome & Overview

10:50 - 12:00

Session 1:

Guillaume Waignier (LIFL): Contracts in Dynamic Architectures
Brecht Desmet (PROG):Context-Oriented Domain Analysis (CODA): A Case Study

12:00 - 14:00

Lunch

14:00 - 15:10

Session 2:

Guillaume Dufrene (LIFL): Bridging and deploying heterogeneous component frameworks
Niels Joncheere (SSEL): Lifting the Abstraction Level of Web Service Composition Using a Visual Service Composition Environment

15:10 - 15:40

Coffee Break

15:40 - 16:50

Session 3:

Charlotte Herzeel (PROG): A Temporal Logic Language for Context-Dependence in Crosscuts
Koen Victor (Distrinet): Context aware flooding for context data in AmI environments

16:50

Hotel check-in (downtown)

19:00

Dinner in La Villette


Day 2: Feb 20 VUB Building F, 4th floor. Room F1.03

9:50 - 10:20

Travel time

10:20 - 10:40

Coffee Break

10:40 - 12:00

Session 4:

Naouel Moha (LIFL): Detection and Correction of Design Defects in Object-Oriented Architectures
Christophe Scholliers and Eline Philips (PROG): Fact Spaces : Coordination in the Face of Disconnection

12:00 - 14:00

Lunch

14:00 - 15:10

Session 5:

Ales Plsek (LIFL): Evolvable middleware container architectures for distributed embedded systems
Mathieu Braem (SSEL): Requirements for applying aspect-oriented techniques in web service composition languages

15:10 - 15:40

Coffee Break

15:40 - 15:55

Goodbye

15:55

Travel Time



Session 1

Guillaume Waignier (LIFL): Contracts in Dynamic Architectures

Applications need to adapt themselves in order to follow the evolution of their environment and to take into account new user's requirements. In the context of the component-based applications, an adaptation corresponds to a reconfiguration of the architecture. This reconfiguration can be the addition or the withdrawal of bindings between components, the addition of new components, etc. But, there is still a risk of breaking the application. Thus in order to guarantee the validity of the architecture, it is necessary to add contracts on architecture in order to specify the functional, extra-functional, structural and quality of service properties. The validation of these contracts during each reconfiguration will ensure that resulting architecture is coherent.
We illustrate the need of contracts with a business application of medical data of patients. This data is heterogeneous and can be consulted by a doctor using various devices. We present the various kinds of contracts defined in this application, how they are validated and composed.

Presentation slides

Brecht Desmet (PROG):Context-Oriented Domain Analysis (CODA): A Case Study

The omnipresent integration of computer technology in everyday applications introduces new opportunities to make software systems aware of the context in which they are used. Such context-aware systems can respond more adequately to user expectations. However, modelling the requirements of context-aware systems for various stakeholders using general-purpose techniques has been recognized as a cumbersome task. We therefore propose a model called Context-Oriented Domain Analysis (CODA) which is especially designed to capture the requirements of context-aware systems.

Presentation slides


Session 2

Guillaume Dufrene (LIFL): Bridging and deploying heterogeneous component frameworks

Many component frameworks are now available.
In most cases applications written with heterogeneous component models can not interoperate. As a consequence data exchanges or workflows intervening between two models are difficult to manage. We also try to find a way to deploy heterogeneous application written with different frameworks on many computers. Our proposal is based on proxy component for the first issue and using a Generic Deployment Framework for the second. Our project is currently based on Fractal and SCA.
Fractal is the ObjectWeb component model proposed by France Telecom and INRIA to develop systems and middleware. SCA is an emerging solution developed mainly by IBM, BEA and Oracle to define a component model for service-oriented architectures.
My work proposes solutions to let SCA and Fractal components to communicate with each other by the mean of common protocol such as SOAP. Fractal Deployment Framework can be used to deploy the distributed application.

Presentation slides

Niels Joncheere (SSEL): Lifting the Abstraction Level of Web Service Composition Using a Visual Service Composition Environment

Composing web services using current web service composition languages (such as BPEL) requires a large amount of in-depth knowledge. Our approach introduces a service composition environment (SCE), which aims to facilitate web service composition by providing a higher level of abstraction and guiding developers in creating valid compositions. This is accomplished by allowing graphical composition of web services, supporting prediction and verification of quality-of-service properties, and supporting modularization of crosscutting concerns using concern-specific languages and the Padus AOP language

Presentation slides


Session 3

Charlotte Herzeel (PROG): A Temporal Logic Language for Context-Dependence in Crosscuts

When implementing graphical user interfaces, web services, distributed applications etc. the event-driven paradigm is often used. The well-known phenomena of "crosscutting concerns" applies in this context as well, so that the implementation of a single func tionality gets scattered over multiple event handlers. In addition we observe that these crosscutting concerns often depend on temporal relations between events. Though aspect-oriented programming already offers solutions for modularizing cross-cutting concerns, none of these are entirely satisfying given the event-driven paradigm, when it comes to expressing the latter kind of temporal relations. The goal of my research is to tailor aspect-oriented programming to the event-driven paradigm by combining the ideas behind context-aware aspects and history-based aspects. More specifically I am in this respect interested in finding out what the requirements for a flexible pointcut language are. So far I have been experimenting with temporal logic programming as a basis for such a language. The latter is a natural choice as it was designed to reason over historical data. Furthermore, I aim to address issues such as managing an ever-growing join point history and aspect-interaction problems.

Presentation slides

Koen Victor (Distrinet): Context aware flooding for context data in AmI environments

The ever-growing presence of information-processing and communication-supporting components, is what lies at the basis of Ambient Intelligence or AmI. This creates a great potential for new, integrated services that adapt to the user and his wider general context. Context is the key element for services that adapt their behaviour or functionality to provide a better user experience. The network in an AmI environment contains a potentially enormous amount of context aware services that sense, gather and distribute context information. It is a combination of structured and unstructured network topologies. These characteristics make efficient distribution and use of context information difficult. Without a central context repository, or a central server that locates the context information, it is difficult to address parts of the environment that contain relevant context information. In the presentation I present context aware flooding as a way to distribute and gather context data in an AmI environment. With context aware flooding, each network node relies on its context data to decide whether it may store or distribute a received context data item. Context aware flooding allows efficient asynchronous context data retrieval from the network, and facilitates bounded context data distribution.

Presentation slides


Session 4

Naouel Moha (LIFL): Detection and Correction of Design Defects in Object-Oriented Architectures

Design defects come from “poor” design choices and have the effect of degrading the quality of object-oriented designs. Therefore, they present opportunities for improvements. However, design defects have not been precisely specified and there are few appropriate tools that allow their detection as well as their correction. Our goal is to provide a systematic method to specify design defects precisely and to generate detection and correction algorithms from their specifications. The detection algorithms are based not only on metrics but also on semantical and structural properties whereas the correction algorithms are based on refactorings. We apply and validate these algorithms on open-source object-oriented programs to show that our method allows a systematic specification, a precise detection, and a suitable correction of design defects.

Presentation slides

Christophe Scholliers and Eline Philips (PROG): Fact Spaces : Coordination in the Face of Disconnection

Coordination languages for ad hoc networks with a fluid topology do not offer adequate support to detect and deal with device disconnection. Such a disconnection is particularly relevant if the device provided context information rather than emitting messages, as such context information then becomes invalid. We proposed the Fact Space Model which establishes a logic coordination language on top of Lime’s federated tuple space. In the model, the federated space offers applications a consistent view of their environment over which they can reason using logic rules. These rules encode which conclusions may be drawn from the presence of particular facts, and are similarly used to ensure the consistency of these conclusions when devices go out of range. By allowing applications to add application-specific hooks to these rules, the application programmer is offered a general-purpose mechanism to respond to the discovery and disconnection of devices.

Presentation slides


Session 5

Ales Plsek (LIFL): Evolvable middleware container architectures for distributed embedded systems

Distributed embedded systems are becoming increasingly widespread and important. The growing complexity of these systems leads to higher demands on the supportive middleware layer. However, the current practice in development of middleware systems employs traditional object-oriented software engineering techniques which resolves in the unsatisfactory time to market delivery and low adaptability.
The goal of this work is to design a middleware framework based on the Fractal component model which will facilitate the development of reflective and highly evolvable middleware systems. Here, the services represented by the different components can be smoothly incorporated into the execution support thus, providing straightforward adaptation of the whole system. Moreover, this concept offers wide tailor ability which allows targeting embedded systems with hard real-time constrains.
The first part of the talk introduces the state-of-the-art middleware systems and discusses their abilities to evolve towards changing mission requirements. After that, the talk presents non-addressed issues of the discussed solutions and reveals possible contributions to this field.

Presentation slides

Mathieu Braem (SSEL): Requirements for applying aspect-oriented techniques in web service composition languages

In current composition languages for web services, there is insufficient support to explicitly separate crosscutting concerns, which leads to compositions that are hard to maintain or evolve. A similar problem in object-oriented languages is being tackled by aspect-oriented programming, and some work has been started to apply these techniques to web service composition languages as well. We identified some problems in the existing work, and suggest some approaches to handle this. In this presentation the requirements for applying aspect-oriented techniques, to separate crosscutting concerns in web service composition languages, are outlined. The problems with current approaches are shown, and the directions for future research are outlined, listing the features and requirements that we deem necessary in our approach.

Presentation slides