STS'06: Software Transformation Systems Workshop

Workshop Organisers

• Magne Haveraaen, University of Bergen, Norway
• Jim Cordy, Queen's University, Canada
• Jan Heering, CWI, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Eelco Visser, Utrecht University, Netherlands

Important Dates

Workshop schedule:

• 2 page position paper submission deadline: July 15, 2006
• Notification of acceptance: August 31, 2006
• GPCE/OOPSLA registration deadline: September 15 (early)/ October 5, 2006
• Workshop: Sunday October 22, 2006

Motivation

Generative software techniques typically transform components or codefragments, instantiate patterns etc. in some way or another to generate new code fragments, components or programs. Often this needs software support beyond that of existing compilers, i.e., some kind of system which takes software as inputs and produces software as output.

Software transformation systems are tools which are built for such transformations. They range from specific tools for one purpose, via simple pattern matching systems, to general transformation systems which are easily programmed to do any reasonable transformation. Thus the more general tools may be treated as meta-tools for generative programming.

Following on the success of STS'04, this workshop is once again designed to bring together people working on software transformation systems and those with an interest in software transformation systems as a generative tool, with the aim of investigating the use of software transformation tools as tools to support generative programming. We want to look at various generative techniques and suggest how these may be supported by various general purpose transformation tools. This may lead to a more general understanding of common principles for supporting generative methods.

This year's workshop will particularly focus on architecture, reuse, implementation (data representations and algorithms), application models and benchmarks, although contributions on a wide range of topics in the application of software transformation systems in generative techniques are sought.

Workshop format

The workshop will have a small number of participants, around 20, selected on the basis of short position papers submitted to the organisers. The aim is to let people with different perspectives meet in order to allow fruitful interaction.

Program

• 0830-1000 Specific transformation system (toolkits)
  Chair: Eelco Visser
  • Drew Hoskins: Background on Phoenix
  • Pierre-Etienne Moreau, Antoine Reilles: Strategic programming in Java
  • Andreas I. Schmied: The AspectIX Transformation Process Language
  • Victor L. Winter, Christopher Scalzo, Arpit Jain, Brent Kucera, Azamatbek Mametjanov: Comprehension of Generative Techniques
• Coffee break

• 1030-1200 Impact of transformation systems
  Chair: Jan Heering
  The following three papers discuss different angles of the problem of impact of transformation research in industry and the scattering of research efforts. The papers will give rise to plenty discussion, which hopefully will continue into lunch.
  • Martin Bravenboer: Impact of Software Transformation Systems on Language Workbenches and Domain-Specific Language Tools
  • Karl Trygve Kalleberg: Improving the Reuse of Language Infrastructures
  • Tony Sloane, Shirley Goldrei: Towards a coordinated approach to software transformation
  • Jurgen J. Vinju: UPTR: a simple parse tree representation format
• Lunch break

• 1330-1500 Requirements on program transformation techniques
  Chair: Jim Cordy
  Challenges and possible solutions to improve program transformation systems.
  • Eelco Visser: Transformations for Abstractions
  • Daniel J. Quinlan, Richard Vuduc: Requirements for Domain-Specific Source-to-Source Translation
  • Ewen Denney, Bernd Fischer, Johann Schumann: Using Software Transformation Systems as Program Generator Backends
  • Chung-Horng Lung: Moving towards Architecture Driven Software Transformation
• Coffee break

• 1530-1700 Applications of program transformation
  Chair: Magne Haveraaen
  • Ralf Lammel: Evolution-enabled application-programming interfaces
  • Ashley W. Brown, Wayne Luk, Paul H.J. Kelly: Generating Hardware Designs by Source Code Transformation
  • Elizabeth Dancy, Jim Cordy: Generating Software Tuning Panels for Autonomic Control
  • I. Karlin, Jean Utke: Source Transformations for Automatic Differentiation controlled by Performance Metrics

Each speaker is given 15 minutes for presentation and quick questions. The remainder of the session is for discussing the topics raised by the speakers.

Submission of intent to participate

If you find this workshop interesting you should send an e-mail to sts06@ii.uib.no with your intent to participate and your area of expertise/interest. Space may be limited at the workshop, and registered participants will be given priority.

Registration

Workshop participants should register for the GPCE'06 conference. Those who only wish to participate in the workshop should register for any one day of the conference. The badge will let you attend the workshop as well as the chosen day of the conference.