8:30-10:00AM - General Session - Invited Speaker
Cobb Galleria Centre, Exhibit Hall A

"Cryptopolitics"
Whitfield Diffie,
Sun Microsystems

Network security would probably be a solved problem if everyone would just push in the same direction. The basic tools have been developed and are ready for a period of installation and shakedown. Unfortunately, network insecurity is a big business and doesn't take kindly to widespread interoperable security technology. The result has been a decade long stalemate that impedes the -- nonetheless impressive -- growth of Internet commerce and gets in the way of our finding out what "living life on the web" will really be like.

Whitfield Diffie, who holds the position of Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, is best known for his 1975 discovery of the concept of public key cryptography. For a dozen years prior to assuming his present position in 1991, Diffie was Manager of Secure Systems Research for Northern Telecom, functioning as the center of expertise in advanced security technologies throughout the corporation. Among his achievements in this position was the design of the key management architecture for NT's PDSO security system for X.25 packet networks.

Since 1993, Diffie has worked largely in public policy. He has testified twice to the House and twice to the Senate. His position -- in opposition to limitations on the business and personal use of cryptography -- has been the subject of articles in the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Omini, and Discover. The subject has also been covered on the Discovery Channel, Equinox TV in Britain, and the Japanese TV network NHK.

10:30AM-noon

Technical Papers:
Compilers and Tools
Cobb Galleria Centre, Williams Ballroom, Section A
Chair: Craig Chambers (University of Washington)

• "Query-Based Debugging of Object-Oriented Programs"
  Raimondas Lencevicius, Urs Holzle, Ambuj K. Singh (University of California, Santa Barbara)
  
  Object relationships in the modern software systems are becoming increasingly numerous and complex. Programmers who try to find violations of such relationships need new tools that allow them to better explore objects in a large system. Many existing debuggers present only a low-level, one-object-at-a-time view of objects and their relationships. We propose a new solution to overcome these problems: query-based debugging. As a step towards better debugging support, the debugger described here offers the programmer an effective query tool that allows efficient searching of large object heaps and quick verification of complex relationships. Even for programs using large numbers of objects, the debugger achieves interactive response times for common queries by using a combination of fast searching primitives, query optimization, and incremental result delivery.
  

   

• "Back to the Future: The Story of Squeak - A Usable Smalltalk Written in Itself"
  Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, Scott Wallace, Alan Kay (Walt Disney Imagineering)
  
  Squeak is an open, portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to change, debug, and analyze. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks.
  
  Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include: a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object; a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers; efficient bulk-mutation of objects; extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling; and real-time sound synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk.
  

   

• "Constraint Diagrams: Visualizing Assertions in Object-Oriented Models"
  Stuart Kent (University of Brighton)
  
  A new visual notation is proposed for precisely expressing constraints on object-oriented models, as an alternative to mathematical logic notation used in methods such as Syntropy and Catalysis. The notation is potentially intuitive, expressive, integrates well with existing visual notations, and has a clear and unambiguous semantics. It is reminiscent of informal diagrams used by mathematicians for illustrating relations, and borrows much from Venn diagrams. It may be viewed as a generalization of instance diagrams.
  

Practitioner Reports:
Architecture and Implementation
Cobb Galleria Centre, Exhibit Hall A
Chair: Bjorn Freeman-Benson (Object Technology International)

• "Reflections on the ORB: A look back at our experience building an ORB-based architecture"
  R. D. Jordan, M. V. O'Riordan, T. J. Williams (Lucent Technologies)
  
  Our team at Lucent Technologies has developed a new architecture to integrate a family of products onto a common platform. The infrastructure for this new architecture is provided by an Object Request Broker (ORB). In this report we describe the impact of using an ORB in the development of this "real-life" product. Our conclusions are that ORBs are now mature enough to be real enablers in building distributed OO architectures; and that the architecture of the ORB must be well-understood in order to predict the success of the system. We provide specific guidelines on how to take best advantage of the ORB capabilities and how to work around problem areas of scalability and error recovery.
  

   

• "Expert WorkFlow: Building Knowledge Based Workflow Systems"
  Sven Erik Johansson, Benedikte Harstad Kallak, Thomas Bech Pettersen, Jan Erik Ressem (Computas AS)
  
  In this experience report we want to demonstrate how object technology in combination with expert system technology can be used very efficiently to build intelligent workflow systems. We will present two of several "real world" systems of this kind. The systems are developed using a framework that incorporates a rule inference engine and a workflow engine into the general purpose Smalltalk object-oriented programming system. Our experiences show that on one hand high level dynamic object-oriented development environments are very well suited as a tool for building real world expert systems, on the other hand that expert system technology can benefit from being incorporated into a general purpose object-oriented programming language.
  

   

• "Pasta's Revenge"
  Art Griesser (ObjectIntelligence, Corp.)
  
  It is sometimes stated that a major advantage of software objects is their ability to closely model real world objects. Large scale projects designed according to these principles can be difficult to maintain. A major utility constructed a very large infrastructure management program over a period of eleven years. Five years after the project began it was rewritten in Smalltalk. Six years later the program had become a quagmire. Uncommented patches hastily applied to an undocumented framework by inexperienced programmers made the program nearly impossible to understand. If the purpose of structured programming was the elimination of spaghetti code, objects would seem, in the context of this project, to be pasta's revenge.

Panel:
Beyond the Hype: Do Patterns and Frameworks Reduce Discovery Costs?
Waverly Hotel, Grand Ballroom
Chair: Steven D. Fraser (Nortel)

An implicit hypothesis in the development and evolution of software systems is that "discovery costs" are reduced by leveraging knowledge previously collected, analyzed, organized and packaged for application. "Discovery costs" (or "getting started" costs) include both the cost of understanding the problem to be solved (requirements, customers) and the cost of understanding the infrastructure (tools, methods, existing software, people). This panel will debate the effectiveness of patterns and frameworks in the delivery of reduced discovery costs.

Panelists:
Kent Beck (First Class Software)
Grady Booch (Rational Software)
Jim Coplien (AT&T Bell Labs)
Ralph Johnson (University of Illinois)
Bill Opdyke (Bell Labs - Lucent Technologies)

1:30-3:00PM

Invited Speaker:
Cobb Galleria Centre, Exhibit Hall A
"Securing the Networked Future: Can Objects Help?"
Edward W. Felten,
Dept of Computer Science, Princeton University

Computer-mediated communication and cooperation is playing a larger and larger role in our world, so we are increasingly relying on software to protect our interests as it interacts with untrusted people and organizations. Current software does this poorly. In the future, the need to provide practical security will be one of the most important factors limiting the growth and development of new software products and tools. This talk will discuss what we have learned so far about the practical details of building secure software, and how object-oriented systems are likely to either advance or hinder security.

Edward W. Felten is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He heads the Secure Internet Programming group at Princeton, which has discovered many security flaws in popular Internet software, and has done research on methods of preventing future flaws. He has received the NSF National Young Investigator award and a Sloan Fellowship. His research interests include computer security, distributed computing, and operating systems.

Panel: Mid-Year Workshops Report
Cobb Galleria Centre, Williams Ballroom, Section A
Chair: Bob Marcus (American Management Systems)

This panel will report on the results of the OOPSLA Midyear Workshops on "Applied Object Technology". The Workshops were focused on the use of object technology in vertical industries including Finance, Telecommunications, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Insurance and Business Transaction Systems. Attendees were from many different backgrounds including end-users, developers, consultants, academics and standards groups. The members of the panel will present brief summaries and/or conclusions from the Workshops. This will be followed by an open discussion including the audience. The purpose of the panel is to encourage expanded participation in the 1998 Applied Object Technology Workshops.

Panel: Educators' Symposium Report
Waverly Hotel, Grand Ballroom
Chair: Mahesh Dodani (IBM Object Technology University)

The Educators' Symposium presents a unique forum for professionals who have a vested interest in OO education and training. This year, the Symposium will address the three T's of education and training which have been identified as key factors for success in the 21st Century: Thinking, Technology, and Teamwork. Experienced educators and trainers will guide Symposium participants through a series of exercises and discussions to address the main issues governing the three T's and to form a list of action items for addressing these issues immediately. This panel will summarize the issues and discussion from the Symposium.

Panel: DesignFest Report
Cobb Galleria Centre, Williams Ballroom, Section C
Moderator: Peter Kriens (aQute)

In this third OOPSLA DesignFest, participants learn about design by doing design. They will work in small groups to solve one of four problems: Stock Exchange Order Matcher, Personal Expense Account Manager, Video Store Manager, or Client-Server Technical Architecture. Given a domain expert, a timetable, process hints, and a list of deliverables, each team will solve the problem and report on their solution. This panel will summarize the experiences of DesignFest participants.

3:00PM Ice Cream Party Send-Off

[ OOPSLA '97 Home Page | SIGPLAN | ACM ]