DRAFT of the workshop agenda
Copies of Position Papers
Purpose of the Workshop:
The OOPSLA Mid-Year Applied Object Technology Workshop focusing on the telecommunications industry will provide a forum for experienced practitioners to share their insights into the application of object technology to the problems of telecommunications. The workshop will also enable participants to collaborate on a vision for the future solutions that object technology might offer to telecommunications.
Workshop Rationale
The deregulation of the telecommunication markets has lead to an increase in the demand for leading edge technologies to transmit voice, video, and data. Being first to market often provides a significant competitive advantage for telecommunications equipment providers. As the role of software continues to increase in these systems, the requirement to quickly build a high quality system targets this area as well. Flexible architectures that can be molded to provide new features and adapt to standards across multiple technologies is pivotal to this rapid software development.Object-oriented technology has provided an increased focus on building extensible architectures through frameworks, design patterns, and well defined software development methodologies. Thus object-oriented technology would seem to be the ideal software technology for building telecommunications applications. Indeed, there are many well documented cases in switching, provisioning, and other areas where oo has been used to successfully deploy this class of applications. As a result, the industry has pioneered many of the techniques widely used in object technology.
For the design and engineering of distributed telecommunication software a variety of open issues still exist, including:
In this telecommunication software realm, first results have shown the benefits of frameworks as a software engineering means, CORBA as a distribution environment and the ODP based TINA architectures as a design aid. Within this scope, further developments and new research results determine the focus of this telecommunication workshop.
Future requirements and directions - Object technology continues to be technology of choice for new applications within the domain. The future directions of telecommunications software will include a maturing of reliable architectures, standard design patterns and reusable components. The use of application frameworks integrates these technologies.
This workshop examines the issues associated with the development of telecommunications applications. The workshop will focus on the development of frameworks that inter-operate at a variety of levels, the roles of the supporting technologies and the types of development processes that are necessary to integrate these techniques into the typical telecommunications development project. The goal of the workshop is to develop improvements to the technology through patterns, methodologies, and other techniques to enhance the architecture and architecting of telecommunications applications.
Workshop Organization:
The workshop will consist of two full-day sessions. The first day will focus on the state of the art in object technology solutions for telecommunications systems. The tentative agenda includes:
The second day will concentrate on future trends and industry needs.
Workshop Submission:
Individuals interested in participating in this workshop should submit a Position Paper (2-5 pages) defining experiences with the use of object technology, results of practical application of object technology or research findings. A few of these papers will be selected for presentation during the workshop.
Position papers are due by April 1, 1997. Notifications of acceptance to the Telecommunications Workshop will be distributed by April 15. Include with the response your name, address, voice phone, fax phone, e-mail, and affiliations.
Submissions should be made in electronic form preferably in either html format or in postscript. Please submit to:
Position papers are invited that address issues in the areas of frameworks and architectures for distributed telecommunications software. A statement of the authors' experience should accompany the position paper. Participants should have had major responsibility for the design and development of telecommunications software using object-oriented techniques and architectures.
Benefits of Participation:
Participation in this workshop will benefit both the individuals involved and their organizations. These benefits will be realized in terms of information and actions. In addition, the workshop will outline steps for influencing industry efforts to address manufacturing requirements. A Workshop Report, assembled during and immediately following the workshop by the participants will present the current state of the art in applying object technology to telecommunications systems and an agenda for action that will contain recommendations to industry groups, needed research and development directions. The Report should be of use to any software development group within the industry.
Organizers:
John D. McGregor is a professor of computer science and consultant on object-oriented software engineering. He has been working with telecommunications companies for approximately 15 years. Telecommunications clients include ATT, Lucent, BNR, MCI, and WorldComm. He has worked in many facets of the industry including basic call processing, transmission, services, billing, and provisioning.
Jim Doble is the Chief Software Engineer for Allen Telecommunications Systems. He has over 14 years experience in telecommunication software construction including experience as a senior software architect on a major framework development project at Bell Northern Research. He served as an organizer for the Patterns in Telecommunications workshop at OOPSLA'96.
Granville Miller has extensive experience in developing frameworks in telecommunications systems. He has worked with IBM, BNR, BBT and Make Systems on the development of large technically complex frameworks.
Il-Hyung Cho is a PhD student studying with Dr. McGregor. He participated as Moderator in a DesginFest session on telecommunication at OOPSLA. His research is in the area of testing distributed object-oriented systems.
Declan O'Sullivan has worked in the telecoms industry for about 8 years before joining IONA, addressing issues from Management Systems right through to network and service delivery systems. Within IONA, Declan is responsible for ensuring that the IONA set of CORBA products meet the requirements of the telecoms industry.
Colm Bergin is Associate Vice President of Professional Services at IONA, responsible for IONA's consulting and training operations in the United States. At IONA, Colm has helped architect distributed systems using CORBA and object-oriented techniques for a number of large clients including Motorola and Enron Capital and Trade Resources, and has delivered numerous training courses and seminars on the development of distributed applications using Orbix, IONA's implementation of the OMG's CORBA architecture. Colm has over 10 years experience in software development, mostly in the field of telecommunications, with companies such as NEC, Motorola and DSC Communications, working on distributed systems for network management, PBX control, and ATM multiplexing and switching. His early background was in distributed systems research at Trinity College from which he received a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science.
Dr. Klaus-Peter Eckert works for more than ten years in the area of distributed object technologie. Currently he is involved in the development of a CORBA based processing environment for telecommunication applications.
Peter Schoo is active in the field of architectural and object-oriented support for the development of telecommunications services. Currently he work in projects developing distributed telecommunication applications and developing service creation environments both addressing a CORBA based target environment.