ECOOP 2015
Sun 5 - Fri 10 July 2015 Prague, Czech Republic

Welcome to the website of the JSTools 2015 conference. We are working hard to fill the website with all related information. Please check back soon!

JSTools 2015: Call For Papers

View track page for all details

The challenges addressed by JSTools include:

  • What constitutes a JavaScript program itself is an increasingly slippery concept. Even simple web pages tend to be composed of multiple script tags in a Web page, some of which refer to external source files and some of which contain inline code. Further code is commonly added with handlers attached to various Web page elements. Depending on the particular structure of these tags, the semantics of the induced program can differ. And further, code is often loaded dynamically into a page, for instance by dynamically creating new script tags in the current page.
  • Web pages increasingly use concurrency. While JavaScript itself is single-threaded, execution in modern browsers sometimes is not entirely, and, even when it is, asynchronous styles such as AJAX can introduce non-determinism into when pieces of code execute. Even the initial parsing of the Web page is often not atomic from the point of view of the code. JavaScript is an extraordinarily dynamic language including a wide array of features for reflective programming and runtime code generation. This makes it challenging to design an internal representation as is commonly used for analysis and optimization purposes, since the semantics of even a simple statement can depend on the runtime state of the program in subtle and complex ways.
  • Almost all JavaScript programs rely on extensive native API libraries such as the browser’s DOM implementation for web applications, or APIs for accessing mobile phone hardware for mobile applications. Modeling the semantics of these libraries is a formidable task, but essential for analyzing real-world programs. Additionally, many programs use framework libraries such as jQuery or Sencha; while these are themselves written in JavaScript, they tend to use sophisticated coding patterns that are often extremely difficult to analyze.
  • JavaScript has given rise to variants such as ActionScript (the language behind Flash) and TypeScript (a strongly typed dialect of JavaScript), while JavaScript itself also keeps evolving. Supporting these dialects and new features is often desirable, but adds considerable additional complexity.

Various research and project groups have addressed these challenges, and there is a growing body of infrastructure that can be used and extended to tackle JavaScript. In this workshop, we hope to bring the builders and interested consumers of such tooling together. We plan to have a focus on tooling that, at least to some extent, addresses these challenges in a practical way. We want a combined focus on the research challenges the tools address and a tutorial-like to using these tools as well.

Submissions

We welcome any submissions of work in this field: you may submit a paper, an abstract for a talk, or a talk abstract together with a supporting position paper. To submit, please e-mail submissions to the organizers. Papers will be published on this site if desired by the authors. We propose to follow this style; if desired, slides from talks will be put online on the workshop Web site, but talks can also be kept unpublished if that is preferred so as not to preclude future publications in workshops and conferences. The organizing committee will referee submissions for relevance, as we are looking for ongoing work more than finished research projects. Additional expert opinions may be requested from the expected participants.

More details

The external web page of the workshop is here.