Sponsors and Organizers

• The Object Management Group (OMG) is the software industry's largest consortium and is focused on open interoperable component software interface and framework technology.
• The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funds revolutionary software research in the U.S.
• Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) is a research consortium funded primarily by industry.
• Object Services and Consulting, Inc. is a software research and development company.

Objectives of the Workshop

• component software architectures
• web and distributed object architectures

• Application development teams spend too much time coping with the complexities of their chosen middleware, services, tools, web, and programming environments. An application's choices of underlying middleware products become pervasive and irrevocable commitments of the application.
• Complex distributed application logic must be delivered via the web, and today there are object model and service architecture mismatches.
• The goal of assembling applications from reusable components is still elusive because business applications require system-wide properties like reliability, availability, maintainability, security, responsiveness, manageability, and scalability (the "ilities").  Assembling components and also achieving system-wide qualities is still an unsolved problem. As long as the code that implements ilities has to be tightly interwoven with code that supports business logic, new applications are destined to rapidly become as difficult to maintain as legacy code.

The workshop is intended to bring together a mix of leading industry, government, and university software architects, component software framework developers, researchers, standards develpers, vendors, and customers to do the following:

• better understand the state of practice of industry component software initiatives (ActiveX, OMG's OMA/CORBA, Java, W3C) and how far they go in solving problems of composability and plug-and-play.
• better understand how software architectures play a role in integrating web and object service architectures and in building systems that can maintain architectural properties (e.g., composability, scalability, evolvability, debugability).
• identify key technologies, directions and  convergence approaches and characterize open research problems and missing architectural notions.

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Structure and Content of the Workshop

Topics of interest (but not limited to):

• State of practice in component software and software architecture - e.g., views from Microsoft, Netscape, JavaSoft, OMG/ODP, and the software architecture R&D community.
• State of practice in web + distributed object integration - e.g., views from Netscape, Visigenc, Iona, JavaSoft, W3C, Microsoft, web-objects architecture R&D.
• Characterizing the problem.  What do large application developers and enterprise software architects want? How do they avoid building more unmaintainable legacy applications? How do they build applications with fifteen year life cycles on middleware products that change annually? How do they architect systems so that both functionality and architectural -ilities can be upgraded over the application's life cycle?  Approaches to evolution of software.
• Composing components. What are examples of minimal common infrastructures that enable component composition. Are we there yet with respect to plug and play? Problems with component software approaches (devils' advocate positions) and solution approaches (counter arguments) - e.g., footprint, too many interfaces, uncontrolled evolution.  Economy of component software.  Is component software a silver bullet or a nightmare or yet-another-technology?
• Composing object services.  How can we compose object services?  could you make a competitive OODB from naming, persistence, transactions, queries, etc.?  Implicit interfaces and wrappers.  What behavioral extensions can be added implicitly to a system?  Mechanisms like POA, interceptors, before-after rules to guard objects to insure they are acted on by implicit operations.  Terminology - e.g., loose or tight coupling, granularity, frameworks.
• Architectural properties.  What are ilities, i.e.,  some property added to a system that is independent of the functionality of that system.  How to insert them into component software architectures?  Say you had a system doing something.  How would it look different if ility X was added or removed?  Is there some kind of architectural level where the boundary between the visibility/hiddeness of the ility changes?  What is needed in the architecture in order to add ilities?
• Scaling component software architectures.  Frameworks, patterns, configurations, inter component protocols.  Examples of composition involving heterogeneous data sources.   Federation - do we have to federate the services when we have ORBs on 40,000,000 desktops?  what can we say about the federation pattern? end-to-end, top-to-bottom ilities like optimization, QoS, security, ...
• Adaptivity of component software architectures.  Tailorability, evolvability, assured services and graceful degradation, survivability.
• Web object models, metadata and registry/repository in Internet/Web.  How do DOM, XML, PICS-NG, RDF, and the many metadata proposals relate to object and agent definition languages?
• Convergence of ORB and Web architectures.  (Why) are both camps doing the same things differently? How to avoid recreating the same set of services like versioning on both architectures.

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Outcomes

• Explicit outcome - a workshop report to be available on the web soon after the meeting.  The workshop report will include:
• position papers
• workshop breakout session reports
• summary of research issues, proposed architectural frameworks, key research directions, i.e., key conclusions in a nutshell.
• Implicit outcome - possible direction changes and convergence among technologies as different groups (e.g., OMG, W3C, ODP, IETF) understand what others bring to the party.

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Position Papers

The workshop committee will announce accepted papers on or before December 7, 1997. All accepted position papers will be posted on the web. An accepted position paper is a prerequisite for attending the workshop except for a small number of invited speakers.

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Logistics

The meeting hotel is the Monterey Marriott, located two minutes' walk from Monterey Bay Fisherman's Wharf, at 350 Calle Principal at Del Monte Blvd., Monterey, CA 93940, (408) 649-4234. The room block under the name "Compositional Software Architecture Workshop" will be held until December 15, 1997.  Negotiated rates are $119/night (up to 15 reservations at Government per diem of $71).

The workshop fee is $225 payable by check or credit card to MCC. Participants can reserve hotel rooms and pre-register by completing the attached registration form and sending it to Felisa Legaspi, MCC/WCL, 2099 Gateway Place, Suite #450, San Jose, CA 95110.  For questions, contact Felisa Legaspi at (408) 573-4130-tel, (408) 573-4140-fax, legaspi@mcc.com.

Directions: From the Monterey Airport/Hwy. 68: Take the Monterey Fisherman's Wharf exit. At the first stoplight, turn right on Aguajito. Continue on Aguajito until it ends at Del Monte. Turn left on Del Monte and continue straight for three stoplights. At the third stoplight, get in the left turn lane and continue straight on Del Monte to the hotel.  Taxi from Monterey Airport is $8.  Valet parking is $12/day.  There is a public garage 1-2 block from the hotel.

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Important Dates

• November 21, 1997 - position papers due (extended from Nov 14)
• December 7, 1997 - announce accepted papers. These will be available on the web.
• December 15, 1997 - last date for room block reservations

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Workshop Committee

• Randy Garrett, DARPA (co-chair)
• Barry Leiner, consultant
• Ted Linden, MCC
• Andry Rakotonirainy, DSTC
• Richard Soley, OMG (co-chair)
• Craig Thompson, OBJS
• Gio Wiederhold, Stanford

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Organizers