RE: [abc] plans

Hello all and thanks for the warm welcome.

> Separately, I'd like to start an AOP reading group, where we discuss
> good papers on aspects by others.
> I'd like to do this on Wednesday afternoons at 2pm, starting next
> week with Jonathan Aldrich's paper on open modules. The idea is that
> everyone reads the relevant paper and comes armed with questions and
> criticisms; one of us takes the lead in presenting the paper. I'll do
> the first one and I'll put up a suggested schedule on the wiki - in
> the hope that you'll all add further papers to the list!
Obviously I won't be able to attend but I could read the paper though.
 
> It would be good if we could also set up a skype meeting in the
> coming week that includes non-Oxford team members. Laurie suggests
> Wednesday next week, morning her time, so say 3:30pm our time, after
> the reading group?
I would be fine with that. So 4:30 for me then. Oege: I tried to add you
("oegerikus" - I guessed that was you) but did not get an authorization yet.
 
> For everyone, what about planning an intensive abc week, sometime
> soon? We (the Oxford gang) have sufficient travel money... also,
> we'll all be at OOPSLA. Of course we'd also be happy to host you at
> Oxford, but we're not allowed to use the EPSRC funds for that.
Well with respect to that: I would definetely like to attend because I have
no funding yet, I guess I would unfortunately not be able to attend in
either case. (Laurie?)
 
W.r.t. contributions: I have my last two important oral exams coming up,
which is Operations Research at the End of Semptember and Compiler
optimizations / Logic Programming in the end of November. Both are very
demanding and require several weeks of preperation. So I won't be able to
contribute a lot. Though, I would still like to help where I can, especially
on topics which relate to what I am currently working on, like TraceMatches.

For everyone who does not know yet what I am doing for my diploma thesis:
I wrote an extension of abc implementing an extended pointcut language
featuring linear time operators (LTL).
You can read more about it here: http://www-i2.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/JLO
Also, find a *very early alpha version* of my thesis attached. Please don't
distribute this.
I found that although the LTL semantics and the tracematch semantics are
quite different (LTL has no "skip" for instance, it has "interleaving
semantics"), the implementation *can* be done almost equivalently, when
getting the automaton part right. So in the end you would have different
trace description languages for different purposes but with the same
backend. Part of this will be going into my thesis but certainly there will
be more to do lateron. I don't know if this is worth a paper, but I think it
sounds nice to have a unified trace and automaton model for OO languages in
general. What do you think?

For the following I don't know how much I will be able to contribute given
that I have little time but I will see what I can do.

> AOSD submission, September 23 (abstract) and 30 (paper):
> * Composing Aspects with Open Modules in AspectJ
>
> Extending Jonathan Aldrich's Open Modules proposal
> to the full AspectJ language, and how it is implemented
> in abc. Neil's MSc dissertation; I've put a draft
> of Neil's dissertation at
> http://musketeer.comlab.ox.ac.uk/~oege/neil.pdf
> Please don't distribute it, it's for internal use
> only at the moment.
That's certainly something I would like to help with. As I said I am going
to do some background reading and it would be great if you could notify me
of the outcomings of your reading group etc.
 
> CC submission, October 7 (abstract) and 14 (paper):
> * Compiling around advice
>
> comparison of different strategies for compiling
> around advice (inlinining, continuations, etc)
> It would be great if the McGill gang takes the
> lead on this.
Does sound interesting but I don't know if I have enough background
knowledge yet and especially time for extensive comparisons given that I am
in a phase of heavy learning.

> AOSD and ETAPS tutorial submissions, October 14:
> * Implementing Aspect-Oriented Programming Languages
>
> Whole day, similar to last year but focussing on big
> extensions like open modules, pure aspects, and
> tracematches. Include intro to program analysis.
That is certainly something I would be *very* interested in given that, as I
said, I did an extension myself which is similar to TraceMatches.
 
> OOPSLA conference, October 15
> * abc release with open modules and tracematches
> (main to-do item: around)
> * final version of codequest and abc posters
I would certainly like to have a short look on this be fore you submit it.
It could give me some last input for my thesis.
 
> ECOOP submission, December 20 (?)
> * DataLog pointcuts in AOP
>
> Focus on how to use datalog as a pointcut language,
> bringing together the Stanford PQL work with our
> own stuff on static pointcuts. Mostly a design paper,
> but also first steps towards incremental updating of
> database?
>
> Full version of OOPSLA poster, slanted towards the
> aspects crowd. Elnar's MSc dissertation.
I have a good background on logic programming and this is one of the topics
I will be revising towards november anyway so I think it would be great if I
could be of help here.
 
> * Optimising tracematches?
>
> The stuff that Pavel and Julian have been doing
> already merits a paper on its own, I think, but it's
> quite technical.
I have thought a lot about optimizing my LTL implementation so I guess there
would be a lot of synergies. I would be certainly interested here.

Also my supervisor Volker Stolz and I were planning to submit an excerpt of
my thesis to AOSD - basically the LTL semantics and some example of how the
logic can be used for verification and *roughly* how it relates to other
trae languages like trace matches. First of all I would like to know what
you think about this and secondly of course I would also like to invite
everyone who is interested to contribute, if you agree that it would be
worthwhile trying.

Thanks a lot,
Eric

-- 
Eric Bodden
Chair I2 for Programming Languages and Program Analysis
RWTH Aachen University