Second International Workshop on Coordination and Adaptation Techniques for Software Entities
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ABSTRACT
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Coordination and Adaptation are two key issues when developing complex distributed systems. Coordination focuses on the interaction among computational entities. Adaptation focuses on the problems raised when the interacting entities do not match properly.
This is the second edition of the WCAT workshop, initiated at Oslo jointly with ECOOP 2004 (http://wcat04.unex.es).
The aim of WCAT'05 is to provide a venue where researchers and practitioners on these topics can meet, exchange ideas and problems, identify some of the key issues related to coordination and adaptation, and explore together and disseminate possible solutions.
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MOTIVATION
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In the recent years, the need for more and more complex software, supporting new services and for wider application domains, together with the advances in middleware technologies, have promoted the development of distributed systems. These applications are constituted by a collection of interacting entities (either considered as subsystems, modules, objects, components, or more recently web services) that collaborate to provide some functionality.
One of the most complex tasks when designing and constructing distributed systems is not only to specify and analyze the coordinated interaction that occurs among the computational entities, but also to be able to enforce them out of a set of already implemented the computational entities. This fact has favoured the development of a specific field in Software Engineering devoted to the coordination of software. Such discipline, covering Coordination Models and Languages, promotes the re-usability both of the coordinated entities, and also of the coordination patterns.
In fact, the ability of reusing existing software has always been a major concern of Software Engineering, being at the root of the so-called Component-Based Software Development. The paradigm "write once, run forever" is currently supported by several component-oriented platforms. However, existing components are hardly reused as they are, and a certain degree of adaptation is always required.
To deal with those problems, a new discipline, Software Adaptation, is emerging. Software Adaptation focuses on the problems related to reusing existing software entities when constructing a new application. It is concerned with how the functional and non functional properties of an existing software entity can be adapted to be used in a software system and, in turn, how to predict properties of the composed system by only assuming a limited knowledge of the single components computational behavior. The need for adaptation of software entities can appear at any stage of the software life-cycle, and adaptation techniques for all the stages must be provided. Anyway, such techniques must be non-intrusive, and based on s