Chair: James Noble
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
The 2002 OOPSLA Doctoral Symposium will prepare the leaders of the future of object-oriented technology. In the symposium, a selected group of doctoral students present their work in a closed session and obtain guidance from university and industry mentors. This year's mentors are Prof. Alan Borning (The University of Washington), Prof. Mira Mezini (Darmstadt University of Technology), Dr Dirk Riehle, and Dr. Mario Wolczko (Sun Microsystems Laboratories Inc). All doctoral symposium presenters have a poster on display during the conference and a two-page short paper published in the Conference Companion proceedings.
We propose the Component Performance Assurance Solutions (COMPAS) framework that can be used during as well as after development to identify performance problems, suggest corrections and predict performance in large-scale component-based distributed enterprise systems. COMPAS consists of three interrelated modules: monitoring, modelling and prediction.
Maintainability is becoming increasingly important, as systems will have to evolve and adapt to changing environments. We investigate dynamic software architectures as a means of providing facilities for developing dynamically adaptable applications.
Java's threading specification is fundamentally flawed. Some language features are under-specified while others are over-specified, and some have no specification at all. We attempt to provide a clear and concise definition of thread interaction to remedy these limitations.
If interfaces were to be described in application domain terms then mappings could be provided to enable translations from application domain entities to syntactic interface entities. More specifically, this capability could enable automated adaptation to resolve syntactic discrepancies between semantically equivalent entities at runtime.
We propose the creation of an aspect-oriented infrastructure to support a variety of software development tools. We investigate several new directions in aspect-orientation: aspects in system software, language independent aspects, aspect integration techniques, and opportunities for aspect reuse.
We propose the use of programmer extensible program annotations as a means to represent that information about the domain. Using these program annotations we can specify join points by means of semantic properties of the programs, thereby improving the reusability and robustness of aspects.
We propose "Aspectual Collaborations", modules tailored to capture multi-object behavioral interactions, both at the explicit and implicit levels. We explore static and dynamic properties of this construct, and provide a sample Java implementation.
Early-Reply introduces runtime concurrency by forwarding invocation results to the caller as early as they are available. We propose to reformulate Early-Reply using local proof obligations that encapsulate concurrency behind a sequential abstraction of system execution.
We propose a measure of assessing "design readiness" - an assessment of the cognitive state where one is able to understand design abstractly. We will then use programming and design patterns to assist in teaching critical design concepts.