The Cambridge Wireless Software SIG meets next on 11th April 2008 to consider the opportunities and difficulties of developing successful internet applications for mobile platforms.

Dave Burke an engineering manager from Google’s mobile team will speak about the development of applications including: Search, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube and of course Google’s new Android platform. I’m currently trying to source a second speaker from another big Internet player.

The event will be held at Symbian, Milton and starts at 14:00. The event is free to Cambridge Wireless members and tickets for non-members are £150.00 plus VAT.

Visit http://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/events/article/default.aspx?objid=35144 for more information and to sign-up.

Science of Computer Programming has a special issue on Automatic Program Generation for Embedded Systems planned.

Here’s the Call for Papers…

Following the successful first workshop on Automatic Program Generation for Embedded Systems (APGES 2007 http://www.gpce.org/07/APGES07), held in Salzburg, Austria in October 2007, as part of Embedded Systems Week (ESWeek 2007), submissions are invited for a special issue of the journal “Science of Computer Programming”.

Original papers are invited exploring the problems of program generation in embedded systems, especially in the conceptual and theoretical foundations for software generation tools that can enhance the robustness and productivity of generation-based embedded software engineering. Revised and extended versions of papers that were presented at the workshop are welcomed, and should take advantage of any feedback that was offered at the workshop. New papers that were not presented at the workshop are also welcome.

All papers will be reviewed to normal journal standards by an international panel of referees. The increase in complexity of embedded systems software has led to greater interest in improved automation of software production. Automatic program generation is widely promoted in embedded systems design in the form of model-driven development, software product lines, automatic design-space exploration and tailor-made data management, as well as more familiar template-based instantiation of software designs. By taking advantage of the opportunities offered by new research, for example in programming languages and compiler techniques, it may be possible to achieve dramatic productivity gains, with consequently reduced time to market, and yet still offer the necessary strong guarantees of nonfunctional behaviours such as time, space restrictions, power consumption, reliability and other important system metrics. The challenge is to achieve this vision while remaining focused on issues of practicality
and generality.

• The topics to be covered by this journal special issue include (but are not restricted to):
• Industrial experience of automatic program generation techniques
• Correctness and safety issues in model-driven generators
• Automatic design-space exploration for resource-bounded systems
• New tools and methods for automatic generation of embedded systems
• Models for automatically generating embedded systems, including model-driven design approaches
• Tailor-made data management and generation of embedded database systems
• New and emerging program generation technolog
• Models and analysis of real-time, hard-space and power consumption constraints for reasoning about automatically generated embedded systems
• Software product lines, languages for architectures and configurations of embedded systems
• Optimisation of generated programs for embedded systems

Program Committee
Kevin Hammond University of St Andrews, UK (Editor)
Paul Kelly Imperial College, London, UK (Editor)
Danilo Beuche pure-systems GmbH, Germany
Zbigniew Chamski NXP, the Netherlands
Mark Dalgarno Software Acumen Ltd, UK (i.e. me)
Bernd Fischer University of Southampton, UK
Reinhard von Hanxleden Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet zu Kiel, Germany
Christoph Kirsch University of Salzburg, Austria
Anne-Francoise Le Meur INRIA and Universite des Sciences et Technologies de Lille, France
Christian Lengauer University of Passau, Germany
Michael Mendler Otto-Friedrich-Universitaet Bamberg, Germany
Olaf Spinczyk University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany
Satnam Singh Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
Jonathan Sprinkle Berkeley and University of Arizona, USA
Bruce Trask MDE Systems, USA

Submission Instructions
Authors are invited to submit full papers of up to 20 pages in normal Elsevier journal format through http://www.ees.elsevier.com/scico/.

Papers must contain significant new and unpublished material, must not be submitted for publication elsewhere, and will be judged on the basis of relevance, novelty and significance. Authors may submit position papers or survey papers as well as normal technical papers (please mark the paper as a Position Paper or Survey Paper in this case). Presentation at a conference or workshop without a formal published
proceedings, such as APGES, is not considered to constitute prior publication. In case of doubt in other cases, please do contact the editors, who will be happy to offer individual advice. Note: it is important that authors select Special Issue: APGES 2007 when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process. Please refer to the SCP’s Guide for Authors when preparing your paper(http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/505623/authorinstructions).

The Call for Speakers for June’s Code Generation 2008 conference closed yesterday. Thanks to everyone who took the time and trouble to make a submission. Special thanks to those people who made their submissions back in October - this really helps us balance our workload

We’ve had a total of 46 session proposals from 40 speakers based as far away as Australia, USA and Singapore and some not so far away such as Cambridge.

Almost half of these session proposals are experience reports which I think is a great indicator that people are using these tools and technologies and having success with them.

It’s going to be a tough job for the programme committee to whittle down these proposals to a probable 25 or so. The review process starts next week and we’ll be contacting the speakers with any immediate questions or comments as they arise.

We aim to finalize the programme in mid-February so that we can launch it on 25th February. In the meantime keep an eye out on the Code Generation 2008 web site for other news.

Update 21/1/08

We gave a few people a slightly extended deadline due to extenuating circumstances. This means that we now have a total of 50 session proposals from 44 speakers.

I predict a big shakeup in the database world with Sun’s acquisition of MySQL.

We looked at MySQL as a product platform in my previous company and used it as a backend admin system and were pretty impressed. We also use it in our backend here.

With Sun behind it this platform could go even further.

We’re trying a little experiment for SPA Cambridge’s January session at Anglia Ruskin University on 16th January (7:00pm (light buffet) 7:30pm (talk) )

This time around we’ve invited a panel of experts to consider the question: “Software Architects - who needs ‘em (and are they overpaid)?”

The panellists, with suitable audience contributions (questions, comments, heckling  etc.), will investigate the role of software architects and the value software architects bring to software development. Are architects needed or will good architectures ‘emerge’ without their intervention? Could your projects use a good architect or would you have been better off without one? Does software even need an architecture?

Panellists have been confirmed as Matt Deacon, Allan Kelly and Nick Rozanski:

Matt Deacon (Microsoft)

Matt Deacon is the Chief Architectural Advisor for the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft Ltd, in the UK. His primary role is to serve as an advisor to Microsoft’s customers, and the public, on all matters relating to the field and profession of IT Architecture.

Allan Kelly (Independent)

After more than 10 years at the code face Allan Kelly came to believe that many of the problems faced by development teams are not in the code but in the management of projects. He has spent the last five years trying to understand and fix problems on the management and organizational side.

Nick Rozanski (Marks and Spencer)

Nick Rozanski is a Lead Technical Architect with Marks and Spencer. He manages a team of Technical Architects who are accountable for Application Services, which includes Application Hosting (.NET and latterly J2EE), Relational Database platforms, Data Warehouse and Business Information, Application Integration, and Non-Production Environments.

I’ll be introducing the panel and feeding them questions should the audience be shy - which has never happened at any previous SPA Cambridge meeting… If there’s anything you’d like me to ask them then let me know.

Hopefully we’ll get someone organised to make a sound recording of this for posterity.

The event is free and open to all but please preregister at http://www.bcs-spa.org/cgi-bin/view/SPA/SoftwareArchitects

The deadline for making a speaking proposal for June’s Code Generation 2008 conference is fast approaching.

We are looking for session proposals covering topics in model-driven software development (including Software Factories, Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), Generative Programming, Software Product Lines and related areas).

If you’re interested in making a proposal then visit http://www.codegeneration.net/conference/speak.php for more information and submission instructions. In addition to paying no conference fees, being a session leader gives you a unique opportunity to present your viewpoint to our audience.

Session proposals must reach us by Friday January 18th.

Code Generation 2008 takes place from June 25th-27th in Cambridge, UK.