Purpose

Relationships and roles are important concepts used in many areas of computer science (e.g., conceptual modelling, database systems, ontology) but are not "first-class" constructs in modern programming languages. In current object-oriented languages, programmers are forced to implement relationships or roles "by hand" (using pointers and collections), leading to a disconnect between models and implementations. This disconnect causes numerous problems across the software engineering life cycle: most importantly, implementations become cumbersome because relationships are represented by several code fragments, scattered throughout the application code, resulting in code fragility. Since current mainstream languages lack appropriate support for heap querying, programmers are further burdened with crafting code to query relationships and check their consistency. As software systems grow and become increasingly complex this disconnect causes problems not only for implementers but also for code maintainers.

In response, a growing number of researchers in the software community are investigating adding first-class support for relationships and heap queries to current programming languages. Interest in first-class support for such constructs is not limited to programming language research. Program analysis, for instance, could benefit from the decreased use of pointers and transparent persistence could benefit from explicit queries.

In this workshop, we plan to gather researchers in the programming language community who are working on relationship-based systems to share their research and to discuss the future of relationship-based constructs in programming languages. We are interested in input from members of the programming language community but also in input from members of related areas (e.g. databases, model-driven development) and domains (e.g., program analysis, orthogonal persistence, type systems) who are using relationships. Some particular areas of interest are:

* relationship-based programming languages
* using libraries/frameworks to support relationships
* first-class queries
* database integration
* serialization or persistence using relationships
* system and framework design using relationships
* understanding or visualizing programs
* ownership and related techniques
* dynamic analysis of relationship usage

This workshop is a successor to the workshop on Relationships and Associations in Object-Oriented Languages (RAOOL) held at OOPSLA 2008.
Schedule

The workshop schedule will be determined once the papers for presentation have been selected. In principle, the workshop will consist of two sessions: a more conference-like session for the presentation of long papers, and a more interactive session for the presentation of the short papers. We will schedule more discussion time for the more provocative short papers. In allow for further discussion and to promote the sense of community, a joint workshop dinner is planned for the day of the workshop.
Contribution

Prospective participants are invited to submit a paper that should fall into one of two categories:

* long paper (max. 8 pages) that describes new work on the above or related topics
* short paper (max. 4 pages) that can describe work-in-progress, report on experiences gained, question accepted wisdom, raise challenging open problems, or propose speculative new approaches

Submissions should be formatted using the ACM SIGPLAN 11 point format. Short papers that will lead to interesting discussions are particularly welcomed.
Proceedings

The selected papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library. In addition, we will make all papers accessible from this web page. Authors who do not want their contributions to be published in the ACM Digital Library may indicate so and have the option to include a 1-page abstract (but must submit the long or short paper for review).
Important Dates
Submission: April 8, 2009, 23:59:59 Apia, Samoa time (see world clock for local times)
Notification: May 8, 2009
Final version: TBD
Workshop: July 7, 2009 (to be confirmed)
Program Committee
Uwe Assmann TU Dresden, Germany
Guido Boella University of Torino
Achim D. Brucker SAP Research, Germany
Stéphane Ducasse INRIA Lille, France
Susan Eisenbach Imperial College London, UK
Manuel Fähndrich Microsoft Research, USA
James Noble Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
David J. Pearce Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Friedrich Steimann Fernuniversität in Hagen, Germany
Mandana Vaziri IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
Organizing Committee
Stephanie Balzer (chair) ETH Zurich, Switzerland balzers at inf.ethz.ch
Gavin Bierman Microsoft Research, UK gmb at microsoft.com
Stephen Nelson (co-chair) Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand stephen.nelson at ecs.vuw.ac.nz
Frank Tip IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA ftip at us.ibm.com
Attendance

The number of workshop participants is limited. If you wish to attend the workshop, but are not an author of an accepted paper, please contact the workshop chair (balzers at inf.ethz.ch) indicating your interest in the workshop and the possible contributions you can make.