2011/01/31

JOT needs you!

Filed under: Editorial — Oscar Nierstrasz @ 22:28

Some of you may be wondering what has happened to JOT.

It seems that for the first time since its inception, JOT has missed a “deadline”, and no new issue appeared in January 2011.

Actually, JOT has moved to a new publication model in which there is no pipeline of accepted papers to be published.  Instead, accepted papers will appear as soon as possible after the final camera-ready copy is provided, whereas in the past, accepted papers sometimes had to wait up to a year to appear on-line.  The old pipeline of accepted papers and regularly scheduled issues of JOT expired with the November 2010 issue. Although the new system promises faster turnaround, the downside is that issues will no longer appear regularly as clockwork.

The current volume of JOT is now open. Articles will appear as they become available.
Although the new JOT promises faster publication for accepted papers, the evaluation process is tougher, while being more transparent (see the information for authors page).

Since the new procedures have been put in place, 43 papers have been submitted in 2010 for publication to JOT. Of these, 38 have been rejected for various reasons. Two papers are in the process of being revised, and a further 3 papers from 2010 are still under review. The average response time, excluding papers still in review was 24 days. The longest response time was 187 days (due to exceptional circumstances). By offering rapid feedback and fast, open-access publication to authors, we believe that JOT offers a highly credible and necessary service for the object-oriented community.

As of 2010, all current and prior JOT articles have Digital Object Identifiers, thus guaranteeing their archival nature. As of 2011, JOT is published by AITO, the steering association behind ECOOP, thus also guaranteeing JOT’s future existence.

JOT welcomes special sections on selected topics, including extended “best” papers of conferences, workshops and symposia. Several such special sections are planned for the coming weeks and months, specifically on:

JOT is changing, but we need your help to keep it going. We encourage our readers to submit mature research papers, state-of-the art surveys, empirical studies and best practice reports as regular technical articles, and reviews, conference reports, and technical notes as blog columns. We promise rapid feedback, quick publication turnaround and archival, open-access distribution.

2011/01/10

OOPSLA day 3 (finally)

Filed under: Conference Report — Tags: — nick @ 09:43

Final day of the conference (is this the latest blog post ever? Probably. Consider it an un-expected Christmas gift):

Homogeneous Family Sharing – Xin Qi

Xin talked about extending sharing from classes to class families in the J& family of languages. Sharing is a kind of bidirectional inheritance, and is a language-level alternative to the adapter design pattern. The work includes formalism, soundness proof, and implementation using Polyglot. Dispatch is controlled by the view of an object, the view can be changed by a cast-like operation.

I didn’t quite get shadow classes, but I think they are like further bound classes in Tribe.

Finally, their families are open, as in open classes, so the programmer can add classes to families post hoc.

Mostly Modular Compilation of Crosscutting Concerns by Contextual Predicate Dispatch – Shigeru Chiba

Chiba presented a halfway language between OOP and AOP called GluonJ. The idea is that it should be a more modular version of aspects (I think). However, it was found to be not as modular to check and compile as standard OOP. The language supported cross-cutting concerns with predicate dispatch and an enhanced overriding mechanism.

Ownership and Immutability in Generic Java – Yoav Zibin

Yoav talked about work that combined ownership and immutability in a single system using Java’s generics. It is nice work, but I’m afraid I was too busy being nervous about being next up to write any notes.

Tribal Ownership – Nick Cameron (me!)

I talked about work with James Noble and Tobias Wrigstad on using a language with virtual classes (Tribe) to support object ownership (i.e., ownership types without the extra type annotations) for free (that is, no additional programmer syntax overhead). I really like this work, it all seems to come together so neatly, which I find pretty satisfying. I really do think virtual classes are extraordinarily powerful and yet easy enough for programmers to understand. Hopefully, they’ll make it into a mainstream language before too long…

A Time-Aware type System for Data-Race Protection and Guaranteed Initialization – Nicholas Matsakis

Nicholas introduced a language (Harmony) where intervals of ‘time’ are represented in the type system to make the language time-aware. This can be used to prevent race conditions in concurrent programs and for other uses (including some non-concurrent ones), such as allowing new objects time to establish their invariants. Intervals are scoped and an ordering may be specified by the programmer; the runtime or compiler may reorder execution subject to this ordering. Checking is modular and is flow insensitive.

OOPSLA day 2 (belated)

Filed under: Conference Report — Tags: — nick @ 09:41

NOTE: I’ve come back to my notes about the last two days of OOPSLA; it’s two weeks since the conference ended, and my memory is already kind of hazy, so the quality of these last two posts might be less than ideal… and another week and a half has passed before I finished even the first of the last two posts, still, better late than never, eh?

Creativity: Sensitivity and Surprise – Benjamin Pearce

Benjamin gave the oddest invited talk I’ve ever seen. He talked about various aspects of creativity over a large set of photographs, including some of his own. The photos were beautiful and made a great show. Not entirely sure what it has to do with programming, languages, systems, or applications, except at the most abstract level. Still an interesting talk, and it seemed to go down very well with the audience too.

Specifying and Implementing Refactorings – Max Schaffer

Automatic refactoring is popular, and correct in the common cases, but specifications are imperfect. The current `best practice’ (e.g., in Eclipse) is to use a bunch of preconditions, but this is not ideal for automatic tools because it is difficult to identify all necessary preconditions; so refactoring sometimes fails, even if all the preconditions are satisfied.

The authors previously suggested specifications based on dependencies and breaking refactorings down into smaller pieces. In this work, they show that this idea actually works for proper refactorings. The dependencies are static and semantic, e.g., constraints on synchronisation and name binding. The authors specified and implemented 17 refactorings.


What can the GC compute efficiently? – Christoph Reichenbach

Christoph presented a system which checks assertions when the garbage collector is run. These assertions are about objects and relations between objects in the heap. This is a pretty efficient way to check heap assertions because the heap must be traversed anyway to do GC. There is a single-touch property – i.e., each assertion can only touch each object once – so checking the assertions is very fast. Their assertion language can describe reachability, dominance, and disjointness, and assertions can be combined with the usual logical operators. Interestingly, garbage collection must be re-ordered to check for reachability and dominance.

Type Classes as Objects and Implicits – Bruno Oliveira

This work `encodes’ Haskell type classes in Scala using generics and implicits (the latter being a Scala feature that enables the programmer to omit some parameters). My understanding of the work was that type classes can be done using only generics, but implicits are required to make the `encoding’ usable by a programmer. There is a whole lot of other complex-Scala-type-system stuff – I have notes about type members and dependent method types, but I can’t remember why…

The interesting thing is that you end up with a really, really powerful language feature: as well as type classes, you can encode session types, which I find incredible (although according to the paper, you can do this with Haskell type classes).

Supporting Dynamic, Third-Party Code Customizations in JavaScript using Aspects

The authors are motivated by the popularity of JavaScript, both on the web and to customise browsers. Such scripts typically rely heavily on code injection, that is inserting new code into existing scripts. This is a pretty ugly process all round – it’s as non-modular as you can imagine and implemented in totally unchecked and unsafe ways (mostly monkey patching). The authors propose doing it with aspect-style weaving instead, but claim it’s not really aspects, apparently. Weaving is done by the JIT. Their empirical results show that their approach is sufficiently expressive for most use.

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