Wednesday, September 27, 2006

WWW2007: Call for Papers

I'm a big fan of the www* conferences, which bring together folks from almost every middleware company, the large ecommerce companies like Google and Amazon, and end users every year. I've participated in the conference as a presenter or program committee member for several years running and I'm pleased to be on the Web services track program committee again this year. If you have some good ideas, interesting experiences or novel research, you should consider submitting a paper.

Oh, and the setting for this years conference is Banff.

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CALL FOR PAPERS
Sixteenth International World Wide Web Conference
Web Services Track
Banff, Alberta, Canada
http://www2007.org
May 8-12, 2007
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The Web Services track of WWW2007 seeks original papers describing research in all areas of Web Services. Topics include, but are not limited to:

* Service contract and metadata
* Orchestration, choreography and composition of services
* Large scale XML data integration
Dependability
* Security and privacy
* Tools and technologies for Web Services development, deployment and
management
* Software methodologies for Service-Oriented Systems
* The impact of Web Services on enterprise systems
* Web Services performance
* Architectural styles for Web Services computing
* Application of Web Services technologies in areas including e-commerce,
e-science and grid computing
* Impact of formal methods on Web Services

IMPORTANT DATES

Refereed Paper submissions due: November 20, 2006 (HARD deadline; no extensions)
Acceptance Notification: January 29, 2007
Conference dates: Tuesday-Saturday, May 8-12, 2007

Submissions should present original reports of substantive new work and can be up to 10 pages in length. Papers should properly place the work within the field, cite related work, and clearly indicate the innovative aspects of the work and its contribution to the field. We will not accept any paper which, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. In addition to regular papers, we also solicit submissions of position papers articulating high-level architectural visions, describing challenging future directions, or critiquing current design wisdom. Queries regarding WWW2007 Web Services track submissions can be sent to Paul.Watson@ncl.ac.uk or Jim@Webber.name.

All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers from an International Program Committee. Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and will also be accessible to the general public via the conference Web site. Authors will be required to sign a copyright transfer form. Detailed formatting and submission requirements are available at http://www2007.org/.

Authors of top-ranked papers from the overall conference will be invited to submit enhanced versions of their papers for publication in a special issue of the ACM Transactions on the Web.

TRACK CHAIRS
* Paul Watson, Newcastle University (UK)
* Jim Webber, Thoughtworks (Australia)

PROGRAM CHAIRS

* Peter Patel-Schneider, Bell Labs Research (USA)
* Prashant Shenoy, University of Massachusetts (USA)

TRACK PC

* Boualem Benatallah, University NSW, Australia
* Sanjay Chaudhary, DA-IICT, India
* Thomas Erl, SOA Systems, USA
* Alan Fekete, University of Sydney, Australia
* Jinpeng Huai, Beihang University, China
* Hiro Kishimoto, Fujitsu, Japan
* Frank Leymann, University of Stuttgart, Germany
* Mark Little, Jboss, UK
* Jimmy Nilson, JNSK, Sweden
* Dare Obasanjo, Microsoft, USA
* Savas Parastatidis, Microsoft, USA
* Greg Pavlik, Oracle Corporation, USA
* Denis Sosnoski, Sosnoski Software Solutions, New Zealand
* Tony Storey, IBM, UK
* Japjit Tulsi, Google, USA
* William Vambenepe, Hewlett-Packard, USA
* Steve Vinoski, IONA Technologies, USA
* Stuart Wheater, Arjuna Technologies, UK
* Michal Zaremba, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Engineering at its best

I have a more than passing interest in mechanical watches. Part of it has to do with a fascination with time itself, but the main motivator is a deep appreciation for the engineering involved with the design of a high quality movement. The essential elements of watch design include economy of space, efficiency of operation and constraints on implementation techniques -- all factors that software engineers should be forced to take into account. Unfortunately this is often not the case, as software developers are able to get away with things that would cause immediate break down in mechanical systems. And even incremental improvements in the practice are fraught with serious regression. Lately, I've thought about what has been most interesting in software development practices in the last 10 years in a very critical light: XP provided several advances in terms of what we know from job enrichment theory and process control in operations management, but also insists on using craftsmanship as the driving metaphor to explain away the need to industrialize the practice -- all the while, industrialization continues to occur as, for example, IDEs are normalized. If only the patterns folks had not fixated on building architects...

In any case, here's a fascinating, detailed look at a movement from a true Manufacture. An interesting thought experiment: If you are a software person, do you think you would be able to provide a reliable movement design? If so, why? If not, why not?