Proceedings of the 8th ACM international conference on Aspect-oriented software development (2009)

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the 8th ACM International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD'09). This volume comprises the final versions of the research and industry papers presented at the AOSD'09 conference held in Charlottesville, Virginia (USA), March 2-6, 2009. The proceedings also contain the abstracts of the keynote presentations. AOSD'09 is the eighth edition in a series of annual AOSD conferences. The series started in 2002 in Enschede (The Netherlands), followed by Boston, Massachusetts (USA) in 2003, Lancaster (UK) in 2004, Chicago, Illinois (USA) in 2005, Bonn (Germany) in 2006, Vancouver (Canada) in 2007, Brussels (Belgium) in 2008, and now Charlottesville, Virginia (USA) in 2009.

This year's conference continues the tradition of being the premier forum for presentation of research and industry results on leading-edge issues in aspect-oriented software development. The theme of this edition, Modularity Across the Software Ecosystem, was chosen to reflect the remarkable growth in scale and complexity of the systems now being developed, where modularity and abstraction are essential, not only in code, but across many kinds of software artifacts, systems, and indeed the whole software ecosystems. Although the central influence of the first editions of the conference was on programming languages and their use, the focus has been broadening to include other activities of software and systems development, such as software and systems specification, architecture, and adaptation. This year, an effort was made to emphasize architecture design, requirements analysis and engineering, aspect modeling, tests, and processes. Thus, the mission of this edition is to fulfill the needs of heterogeneous applications and environments, and to identify new directions for future research and development. AOSD'09 gives academia and industry a unique opportunity to share perspectives with others who are interested in the various forms of modularity and abstraction.

The conference program reflects the balance between research and practice with a mix of research papers, reports from industry, student events, an industrial panel, birds of a feather sessions, and demonstrations. The six workshops held before the start of the conference reflect the breadth of topics of interest to the AOSD community. In addition to the presentation of research and industry papers across seven sessions, the technical program of AOSD'09 includes three keynotes talks: The Future of Software Architectures For Large-Scale Business Solutions: Modularity, Scalability, and Separation Of Concerns by Paul Daugherty, Cyber Physical Systems: Aspects as a Basis for Robustness and Openness by John A. Stankovic, and Everyday Aspects by Gail Murphy. These keynote talks represent, respectively, sophisticated views from the enterprise computing industry, computer systems research, and from the AOSD research community itself.

The call for research papers for AOSD'09 elicited 86 abstracts from the international community, of which 68 were realized as full papers. Each research paper was reviewed by at least three referees, in most cases by four. All papers co-authored by Program Committee (PC) members were reviewed by at least five referees. Based on the reviews, the whole PC discussed the submissions' quality, leading to the selection of 19 research papers for presentation as part of the technical program. In previous AOSD editions, the PC discussions occurred during a physical meeting attended by all PC members. Due to the unforeseen global economic crisis of 2008 and 2009, and rising environmental concerns, the AOSD'09 research papers were discussed among the PC members through teleconferencing and online forums.

This volume of AOSD'09 also includes four industrial papers advanced from the Industrial Track submissions. Representing the evolution in the industrial adoption of aspect-oriented technologies, these papers characterize the diversity and value in commercial application. The Industrial Track provides the opportunity to observe the introduction of a resonating technology to the ever present challenge of scale and complexity in a highly constrained world. To further discover challenges with industrial adoption, the paper presentations are partnered with an Industrial Panel to interactively dissect the challenges to quicken the pace to further industrial success stories.