To: ChadwickMcHenry
Subject: revised abstract
Cc: lieber

Hi Chad:

here is the revised abstract.

-- Karl

Title: Sustainable Software
Speaker: Professor Karl Lieberherr, Northeastern University, Boston
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lieber/
Date: January 10, 2000
Duration: 50 minutes

Abstract:

Software is very brittle for at least two reasons: 
first, many distinct concerns are tangled in one program and, second,
the tangling of the concerns is intense, i.e., the concerns are thoroughly
woven together.

Most applications have some features 
(error-checking strategies, design patterns, collaborations,
synchronization policies,
resource sharing, distribution concerns, performance optimizations, etc.) 
that cut across the modules that make
up the software.  These features increase the complexity of the software
significantly, making the software harder to write, maintain, and evolve.

We present here an approach to software, Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP),
that results in software that is
both smaller and more generic, leading to
looser coupling among the different concerns 
and simpler initial development, maintenance, and evolution.
Aspect-Oriented Programming has strong roots in the
Demeter project in the College of Computer Science.
Adaptive Programming (AP) is a special case of AOP
where some of the crosscutting is expressed
by succinctly embedding small graphs into large graphs.
The succinctness loosens the intense tangling between the concerns.
The talk will show how AP can be used to control the crosscutting between
structure and behavior in the context of XML (Extensible Markup Language)
and XPath (the XML Path language, the traversal language for XML) and
also in the context of UML collaborations and the Visitor design pattern.
Examples will use XML and Java notation.