[PRL] Possibly interesting talk

[Mitchell Wand]

Probably too short notice, but the work might be of interest to some
people-- --Mitch

From: Csail Event Calendar <eventcalendar at csail.mit.edu>
To: seminars at csail.mit.edu
Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2007 00:01:02 -0400
Subject: TALK:Friday 10-5-07 Automated Upgrading of Component-based
Applications

Automated Upgrading of Component-based Applications
Speaker: Danny Dig
Speaker Affiliation: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Host: Michael Ernst
Host Affiliation: CSAIL MIT

Date: 10-5-2007
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Refreshments: 12:45 PM
Location: 32-G7th Floor Lounge

Abstract:
One of the costs of reusing software components (e.g., libraries and
frameworks) is upgrading applications to use the new version of the
components.  Upgrading an application can be error-prone, tedious, and
disruptive of the development process.  Our previous study showed that more
than 80% of the disruptive changes in five different components were caused
by refactorings.  Refactorings are program transformations that improve the
design without changing the observable behavior (e.g., renamings, moving
methods between classes, splitting/merging classes).

I will present briefly a toolkit to automatically update an application to
work with a new version of its components.  The toolkit consists of tools
for recording & replaying refactorings, inferring refactorings, merging
refactorings and edits from components and applications, and shielding
applications from API changes in components.  I will focus on the last tool,
ReBA, that automatically generates a compatibility layer between new
component APIs and old applications.  By giving a component both the old and
the new API, old applications can run with the new version of a component.
 Evaluation on controlled experiments and case studies shows that our
approach effectively adapts applications to new component versions, and is
efficient.

Bio: Danny Dig is graduating with a PhD in Computer Science from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 2007.  He got his M.S.
and B.S. in Computer Science from the "Politehnica" University of Timisoara,
Romania, where he built JavaRefactor, the first open-source refactoring
engine for Java.  He was awarded the 1st Prize at ACM SIGPLAN Student
Research Competition at OOPSLA'05, and the 1st Prize at the inter-
disciplinary Grand Finals of ACM Student Research Competition in 2006.  He
served as the Program and Conference Chair of the First Workshop on
Refactoring Tools (2007), Chair of Doctoral Symposium at ECOOP'07,
Conference Chair of Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP'04), and he delights
in inspiring undergrad students to apply to graduate school.

His research interests are in OO software engineering, with an emphasis on
techniques and tools for improving software design and programmer
productivity.  He is particularly interested in program transformations,
automated refactoring, design & architectural patterns, and broadly
interested in software reuse, software development processes, and software
evolution.  On November 1st he is joining CSAIL to do research on
refactorings that increase the parallelism of existing sequential code.  He
is looking forward to collaborating with you on many other topics.

Relevant URL(S):
For more information please contact: Maria Rebelo, 617-253-5895,
mr at csail.mit.edu
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