4th Workshop on Reactive and Event-based Languages & Systems

Reactive programming and event-based programming are two closely related programming styles that are becoming ever more important with the advent of advanced HPC technology and the ever increasing requirement for our applications to run on the web or on collaborating mobile devices. A number of publications on middleware and language design — so-called reactive and event-based languages and systems (REBLS) — have already seen the light, but the field still raises several questions. For example, the interaction with mainstream language concepts is poorly understood, implementation technology is in its infancy and modularity mechanisms are almost totally lacking. Moreover, large applications are still to be developed and patterns and tools for developing reactive applications is an area that is vastly unexplored.

This workshop will gather researchers in reactive and event-based languages and systems. The goal of the workshop is to exchange new technical research results and to define better the field by coming up with taxonomies and overviews of the existing work.

Previous editions

REBLS’16

REBLS’15

REBLS’14

REM’13

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

Even though reactive programming and event-based programming are receiving ever more attention, the field is far from mature. This workshop will join forces and try to gather researchers working on the foundational models, languages and implementation technologies. We welcome all submissions on reactive programming, aspect- and event-oriented systems, including but not limited to:

• Language design, implementation, runtime systems, program analysis, software metrics, patterns and benchmarks.

• Study of the paradigm: interaction of reactive and event-based programming with existing language features such as object-oriented programming, mutable state, concurrency.

• Advanced event systems, event quantification, event composition, aspect-oriented programming for reactive applications.

• Functional-reactive programming, self-adjusting computation and incremental computing.

• Applications, case studies that show the efficacy of reactive programming.

• Empirical studies that motivate further research in the field.

• Patterns and best-practices.

• Related fields, such as complex event processing, reactive data structures, view maintenance, constraint-based languages, and their integration with reactive programming. IDEs, Tools.

• Implementation technology, language runtimes, virtual machine support, compilers.

• Modularity and abstraction mechanisms in large systems.

• Formal models for reactive and event-based programming.

The format of the workshop is that of a mini-conference. Participants can present their work in slots of 30mins with Q&A included. Because of the declarative nature of reactive programs, it is often hard to understand their semantics just by looking at the code. We therefore also encourage authors to use their slots for presenting their work based on live demos.

Submissions

Submissions deadline: August 21th (updated)

REBLS encourages submissions of two types of papers:

Research results: complete works that ill be published in the ACM digital library.

In progress papers: papers that have the potential of triggering an interesting discussion at the workshop or present new ideas that require further systematic investigation. These papers will not be published in the ACM digital library.

Submission site: REBLS papers should be submitted via HotCRP:

https://rebls17.hotcrp.com

Format: Submissions should be formatted according to the instructions for the authors. Papers can be up to 6 pages in length including references. Authors are required to explicitly specify the type of paper in the submission.

For fairness reasons, all submitted papers should conform to the formatting instructions. Submissions that violate these instructions may be rejected without review.

Submission Site

Please take a moment to read the instructions below before using the submission site.

Concurrent Submissions

Papers must describe unpublished work that is not currently submitted for publication elsewhere as described by SIGPLAN’s Republication Policy. Submitters should also be aware of ACM’s Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism.

Format

Submissions should use the ACM SIGPLAN Conference acmart Format with ‘sigplan’ Subformat, 10 point font, using the font family Times New Roman. All submissions should be in PDF format. If you use LaTeX or Word, please use the provided ACM SIGPLAN acmart Templates provided here. Otherwise, follow the author instructions.

If you are formatting your paper using LaTeX, you will need to set the 10pt option in the \documentclass command. If you are formatting your paper using Word, you may wish to use the provided Word template that supports this font size. Please include page numbers in your submission with the LaTeX \settopmatter{printfolios=true} command. Please also ensure that your submission is legible when printed on a black and white printer. In particular, please check that colors remain distinct and font sizes are legible.

Publication (Digital Library Early Access Warning)

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Sebastian Burckhardt

Don’t Hit Refresh: Towards Automatic Reactivity for Distributed Services

Cloud services are commonly architected as a collection of distributed stateless and stateful services, composed using fallible remote procedure calls. This model can address the key requirements of scalability, fault-tolerance, and manageability at low cost. However, reactive functionality can be challenging to incorporate. Standard mechanisms like streams, publish-subscribe, or explicit dataflow don’t readily compose with the failure model of RPC services. This hampers wider adoption of real-time features for interaction, collaboration, and monitoring. We argue that in a system of composed fallible RPC services, where states and interfaces are clearly identified, it is possible and beneficial to provide reactivity as an automatic behavior. Rather than requiring programmers to explicitly specify dataflow, the runtime can track the distributed execution of a service call, construct a dependency graph, and propagate changes to the client. This dependency graph can be automatically created and maintained, can involve any number data sources, can freely change its structure in response to changing data, and can be recovered automatically on failures.

Bio

Sebastian Burckhardt was born and raised in Basel, Switzerland, where he studied Mathematics at the local University. During an exchange year at Brandeis University, he discovered his affinity to Computer Science and immigrated to the United States. After a few years of industry experience at IBM, he returned to academia and earned his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, he has worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond. His general research interest is the study of programming models for of concurrent, parallel, and distributed systems. More specific interests include consistency models, concurrency testing, self-adjusting computation, and the concurrent revisions programming model.