COP 2015

Welcome to the 7th International Workshop on Context-Oriented Programming

Context information plays an increasingly important role in our information-centric world. Software systems must adapt to changing contexts over time, and must change even while they are running. Unfortunately, mainstream programming languages and development environments do not support this kind of dynamic change very well, leading developers to implement complex designs to anticipate various dimensions of variability. Starting from this observation, Context-Oriented Programming (COP) has emerged as a solution to directly support variability depending on a wide range of dynamic attributes, making it possible to dispatch run-time behaviour on any property of the execution context.

The goal of COP’15 is to further establish context orientation as a common thread to language design, application development, and system support. Several researchers are working on Context-Oriented Programming and related ideas, and implementations ranging from prototypes to mature platform extensions used in commercial deployments have illustrated how multi-dimensional dispatch can indeed be supported effectively to achieve expressive run-time behavioural variations.

This is a follow-up to 6 successful editions, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014, each attracting around 30 participants.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• interesting application domains and scenarios;
• programming language abstractions for context-oriented programming (e.g. dynamic scoping, roles, traits, prototype-based extensions);
• configuration languages (e.g. feature descriptions, transformational approaches);
• interaction between non-functional programming concerns and context-oriented programming (e.g. security, persistence, concurrency, distribution);
• theoretical foundations for context-oriented programming (e.g., semantics, type systems);
• modularisation approaches for context-oriented programming (e.g. aspects, modules, layers, plugins);
• guidelines to include context-oriented programming in programs (e.g. best practices, patterns);
• implementation issues such as optimization, VM support, JIT compilation etc. for context-oriented programming (reflection, dynamic binding);
• tool support (e.g. design tools, IDEs, debuggers).

Call for Contributions

COP invites submissions of high-quality papers reporting original research, describing innovative contributions, or experience with context-oriented programming, its implementation, and application. Papers that depart significantly from established ideas and practices are particularly welcome.

Submissions must not have been published previously and must not be under review for any another refereed event or publication. The program committee will evaluate each contributed paper based on its relevance, significance, clarity, and originality. Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

Papers must be formatted according to ACM SIG format, and can be submitted via EasyChair as a PDF file of at most 6 pages.

Accepted Papers