Workshop Schedule an Analysis of Aspect Composition Problems

Foreword EWAS.06, the third European Workshop on Aspects in Software, follows the tradition of its two predecessor workshop series organized independently by the German " Gesellschaft für Informatik " , Belgian and Dutch research groups. It focuses on providing AOSD researchers and practitioners with an interactive forum for fostering novel ideas and turning submitted material into conference-ready papers. Improving submitted papers is emphasized by highly interactive " writer's workshop " sessions that are designed to give authors constructive feedback regarding their paper's content and presentation. In addition, the EWAS reviewers are typically asked not to confine their comments to criticizing weaknesses but to provide their opinion also on the strengths of a paper and to give advice on how to improve it. This requires more time and consideration than other review formats and therefore EWAS would not be possible without the commitment of many expert reviewers. We are deeply thankful to all the program committee members for the time and effort they put again into their thoughtful reviews. After EWAS 2005 two of the discussed papers were revised, submitted to the AOSD'06 conference and accepted for the main technical programme. We believe this is a good indication of the usefulness of the EWAS format. The EWAS.06 programme contains four full papers (included in these proceedings), a tool demonstration (abstract included) and two " early papers " that where considered worth discussing at the workshop but not yet mature enough for inclusion in the proceedings. The early papers are available at the EWAS.06 website Contact • Organizers and PC chair: [email protected] ABSTRACT The composition of multiple software units does not always yield the desired results. In particular, aspect-oriented composition mechanisms introduce new kinds of composition problems. These are caused by different characteristics as compared to object-oriented composition, such as inverse dependencies. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of aspect-oriented composition problems, and eventually composition problems in a more general context. To this extent we propose and illustrate a systematic approach to analyze composition problems in a precise and concrete manner. In this approach we represent aspect-based composition mechanisms as transformation rules on program graphs. We explicitly model and show where composition problems occur, in a way that can easily be fully automated. In this paper we focus on structural superimpo-sition (cf. intertype declarations) to illustrate our approach; this results in the identification of three categories of …