SCART 2015 - First International Workshop on the ART of Software Composition

In the next future we will be increasingly surrounded by a virtually infinite number of software services that can be composed to build new applications. The production of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) grows exponentially and some companies are accounting for billions of dollars in revenue per year via API links to their services. Moreover, the “Future Internet” (FI) is expected to lead to an ultra large number of available services, hence increasing their number to billions of services in the near future. This situation radically changes the way software will be produced and used: (i) software is increasingly produced according to a certain goal and by integrating existing software; (ii) the focus of software production is on integration of third-parties software that is only provided with an interface that exposes the available functionalities and, sometimes, its interaction protocol. This calls for new software integration paradigms and patterns, formal composition theories, integration architectures, as well as, flexible and dynamic composition mechanisms. Despite the great interest in Software Composition, no common Formal Methods (FM) and Software Engineering (SE) approaches have been established yet for the FI. Developing FI applications via composition of available software encompasses a variety of formally grounded and practical aspects, ranging from modeling and analysis issues, to integration code synthesis, implementation and run-time management issues. SCART 2015 aims at providing innovative contributions to the research and development of novel FM and SE approaches to the design, development, validation and execution of FI applications built through composition of available software.
We are in the Future Internet (FI) era that represents an age of unprecedented opportunities for social, economic, and business growth. The FI promotes the production of large-scale computing environments that will be increasingly surrounded by a virtually infinite number of software services. This enables the growth of innovative and revolutionary everyday-life scenarios.
SCART 2015 provides the opportunity for discussing how the FI affects the traditional SE methods and tools, and how facing its complexity in terms of scalability, heterogeneity, and dinamicity promotes the integration of FM within SE practices. We seek answers on how the rigorousness of FM assists software engineers while designing, developing, validating and operating software systems for the FI, which are built via correct-by-construction service composition. The workshop constitutes a forum for scientists and engineers in academia and industry to present and discuss their latest research and development.
The interplay between SE and FM is by nature tightly intertwined with the “ART” of Software Composition (SCART). That is, in order to make this art effective and elevate itsmaturity to the “readiness level” required for its adoption in practical software integration contexts, novel formally grounded SE approaches, methods and tools are required, especially when automation and correctness of the desired composition is of paramount importance.With this premise in mind, we believe that SEFM constitutes the right place for SCART 2015 where researchers and practitioners can meet, disseminate and exchange ideas, challenges and problems, further identifying and discussing on key issues, sharing knowledge and experiences towards devising together possible solutions and synchronizing on coming future efforts from both FM and SE perspective.
The workshop is partially supported by the H2020 EU project CHOReVOLUTION, whose specific challenge is the definition and realization of a development process to support the effective design, development, deployment and enactment of FI service compositions. To this extent, manyfold collaborations and profitable concertation of efforts within the SEFM community can help reaching ambitious research and innovation objectives in the fields of FM and SE for software composition.