2018/11/16

Introduction to the Meta’16 Workshop Special Issue

Filed under: Announcement,Issue TOC,Special Section Editorial — Alfonso Pierantonio @ 18:25

Guest Editors: Elisa Gonzalez Boixa (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Stefan Marr (University of Kent)

***

This special issue represents a selection of the best papers of the workshop on Meta-Programming Techniques and Reflection 2016 (Meta’16). Meta’16 was held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in October 2016 co-located with SPLASH’16.

Meta is an ACM SIGPLAN workshop for discussing research on metaprogramming and reflection. %, as well as users building applications, language extensions, or software tools using them.
The changing hardware and software landscape, and the increased heterogeneity of systems make metaprogramming once more an important research topic to handle the associate complexity. The scope of the workshop includes a wide range of topics related to design, implementation, and application of metaprogramming techniques, as well as empirical studies on and typing for such systems and languages.

The workshop welcomes mature contributions as well as work-in-progress contributions. A formal refereeing process selects a high-quality set of papers from those submitted at the workshop. Mature contributions are formally published in the workshop proceeding published electronically in the ACM Digital Library. The rest of papers are informally published at the workshop website. The JOT journal version of the papers offered an opportunity for the authors to take a longer term view of their research work and to present new results since the original presentation at Meta’16.

Meta’16 received 14 submissions, of which 7 full papers and 3 short papers were accepted and presented at the workshop. The guest editors of this special issue selected seven papers from Meta’16 workshop and invited their authors to submit an extended version of their paper, including at least 30\% of novel material. All papers have been reviewed by at least three reviewers, and have followed the reviewing process of the JOT journal until the final decision for each paper was reached.

After the journal’s rigorous reviewing process, the editors of this special issue finally selected the following two papers for publication:

  • Yutaro Tsunekawa, Taichi Tomioka, Kazunori Ueda. \textit{Implementation of LMNtal Model Checkers: a Metaprogramming Approach.} This paper discusses an approach for a meta-circular interpreter for prototyping model checkers.
  • Pablo Tesone, Guillermo Polito, Noury Bouraqadi, Stéphane Ducasse, Luc Fabresse. \textit{Dynamic Software Update from Development to Production.} This paper discusses a software update solution suitable for live programming environments.

As editors of this special issue, we hope you will enjoy the selection of papers.  We would like to sincerely thank the Meta’16 program committee and the anonymous referees who provided extensive feedback on the submitted papers; their reviews helped both authors and us, guest editors, to improve the quality of the submissions.

 

 

2015/04/09

Volume 14 issue 1 now live

Filed under: Announcement — admin @ 10:37

The first issue of volume 14 is now online at the JOT website.

Colin Atkinson, Philipp Bostan, Dirk Draheim, Foundational MDA Patterns for Service-Oriented Computing, pp. 1:1-30
Stefan Mutke, Christoph Augenstein, Martin Roth, André Ludwig, Bogdan Franczyk, Real-time information acquisition in a model-based integrated planning environment for logistics contracts, pp. 2:1-25
Naranjo David, Mario Sánchez, Jorge Villalobos, Evaluating the capabilities of Enterprise Architecture modeling tools for Visual Analysis, pp. 3:1-32

2011/12/07

On JOT Special Sections

Filed under: Announcement — avallecillo @ 09:30

It has been almost six months since the JOT Editor-in-Chief, Oscar Nierstrasz, asked me to take care of the JOT Special Sections. It was, I remember, in Zurich, while attending yet another interesting TOOLS conference, and one of the first questions that came to my mind was: Why should anybody want to organize a special section for JOT?

Trying to answer this question motivated me to look for the real raisons d’être for JOT sections, to find out their distinguishing features, and to identify the major advantages they could bring to the community working on Object Technologies. As I soon realized, two of the major advantages of JOT, when compared to other publishing venues, are its timeliness and quality. And they are both essential properties of Special Sections, as we shall see below.

Normally, the main sources for JOT Special Sections are, of course, the conferences and workshops devoted to topics within the scope of the journal (which, by the way, is much broader than most people think, because it encompasses all aspects of Object Technology; see the JOT mission at http://www.jot.fm).

Nowadays there are a myriad of high-quality events with very good papers, which provide excellent snapshots of the research being carried out in most fields. However, it is impossible for the average researcher to read all these workshop and conference papers to keep himself up-to-date. This is precisely where special sections can be so useful: they offer a small selection of the best papers from these events, in particular those papers which are mature enough to present valuable, persistent and distinctive contributions. In addition, an editorial paper from the Guest Editors introduces each topic to distill the main ideas and results discussed during the meeting.

However, this alone is not enough for Special Sections to be useful: the papers also have to be timely! There is no point in reading a paper from a conference or a workshop two years after it was held (and almost three years after it was written). In this respect, JOT can be of great help. In 2010, the renewed JOT journal moved to a new publication model in which there is no pipeline of accepted papers waiting to be published — instead, accepted papers appear as soon as the final camera-ready copy is provided. In addition, we have established a review process for special sections that is able to have papers ready for publication no more than nine months after the conference (including 5 months for preparing the extended versions of the papers), which is much more reasonable.

Another important requirement for the success of Special Sections is to have a thorough and careful review process. This is not only essential for ensuring the quality of the published papers, but it also provides a valuable service to authors. If a paper has been selected, it is because the Guest Editors think that it contains valuable ideas, and that it can be evolved into a mature journal article within a reasonable timeframe. In this respect, it is the job of the Guest Editors and the reviewers of a Special Section paper to help it improve smoothly until it reaches the required level of quality — preferably working more as shepherds and advisors for the paper than as critical judges of it.

Finally, publishing a Special Section with selected papers from a conference or workshop can also be very valuable and rewarding for Guest Editors. They have the opportunity not only to organize the event and select the papers that will be presented, but a Special Section also gives them the chance to prepare a summary for the community; this will introduce the key ideas and concepts from the topic, distill the most valuable discussions held during the event, and will also give prominence to the most significant works presented during the meeting developed to become mature, high-quality journal papers. This is a really valuable service to the community.

In the case of JOT, we have been quite successful so far at attracting Special Sections. Most of them come from events held this year (2011), and are expected to see the light during the first semester of 2012. Others are already planned from 2012 conferences.

  • New Mechanisms for Object Oriented Languages (Best papers of ICOOOLPS and MASPEGHI 2010). Guest editors: Markku Sakkinen and Olivier Zendra).
  • Refactoring and Testing (Best papers of REFTEST 2011). Guest editors: Steve Counsel and Stephen Swift.
  • Object Technology (Best papers of TOOLS Europe 2011). Guest editors: Judith Bishop and Antonio Vallecillo.
  • Model Comparison in Practice (Best papers of IWMCP 2011). Guest editors: Dimitris Kolovos, Davide Di Ruscio and Alfonso Pierantonio.
  • Model Transformations (Best papers of ICMT 2011). Guest editors: Jordi Cabot and Eelco Visser.
  • Object Technology (Best papers of TOOLS Europe 2012). Guest editors: Sebastian Nanz and Carlo Furia.

We are currently preparing a new set of Special Sections. If you recently organized a conference or a workshop, and are thinking of organizing a Special Section, please do not hesitate to contact us.   We are also working on how to make the job easier for Guest Editors, and have prepared a set of resources that aim to help editors: FAQ documents, guidelines, template invitation letters, review forms, etc.

In summary, these past months have been very busy, preparing the supporting infrastructure and organizing the forthcoming special sections for JOT, which we expect you to find useful and interesting. But publishing valuable Special Sections is a collective effort, whose success or failure depends on us all, so please keep your proposals coming!  I am sure the readers of this journal will appreciate it very much.

Antonio Vallecillo.

2011/04/10

Dahl-Nygaard Prize awarded to Chambers and Igarashi

Filed under: Announcement,Uncategorized — Tags: — Jan Vitek @ 11:08

AITO is proud to announce the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2011. The Senior Prize will be given to Craig Chambers, Google, for the design of the Cecil object-oriented programming language and his work on compiler techniques used to implement object-oriented languages efficiently on modern architectures. The Junior Prize will be given to Atsushi Igarashi, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, for his investigations into the foundation of object-oriented programming languages and their type systems. More information is available from AITO and the  ECOOP web page.

2010/07/28

Word template for JOT submissions is now available

Filed under: Announcement — Tags: , — Oscar Nierstrasz @ 14:45

This new template can be downloaded from the information for authors page. It mimics the LaTeX template as far as possible. To use the Word template you should install the Computer Modern fonts (instructions provided).

2010/06/07

Welcome to the JOT Blog

Filed under: Announcement — Oscar Nierstrasz @ 12:11

The Journal of Object Technology is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to the timely publication of previously unpublished research articles, surveys, tutorials, and technical notes on all aspects of object technology. This blog complements the main web site with editorials, reviews, technology updates, and other news items related to object technology.

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