DLS 2012

Dynamic Languages Symposium 2012

Co-located with SPLASH 2012

In association with ACM SIGPLAN

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to Tucson and the 2012 Dynamic Languages Symposium! This year’s symposium—the 8th in the series—continues the tradition of communicating research results in the design, implementation, and application of dynamic languages.

We are happy to report that the overall quality of this year’s submissions was particularly high. Out of a total of 23 submissions, the program committee accepted 10 papers whose topics range from modularity to pattern matching, language semantics, and optimization. The program also includes an invited talk by David Smith on the Virtual World Framework, a new architecture for creating and distributing collaborative virtual spaces that’s built on top of JavaScript and other Web technologies.

Beyond the formal program, we hope this year’s DLS will, like its predecessors, be a valuable forum for sharing ideas with other dynamic language researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world. Thank you for being part of this exciting community, and once again, welcome!

Alessandro Warth
DLS 2012 Program Chair
Google
USA

Supporters

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

The 8^th Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) at SPLASH 2012 is a forum for discussion of dynamic languages, their implementation and application. While mature dynamic languages including Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, Self, Prolog, and APL continue to grow and inspire new converts, a new generation of dynamic scripting languages such as JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, Tcl, Lua, and Clojure are successful in a wide range of applications. DLS provides a place for researchers and practitioners to come together and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development.

DLS 2012 invites high quality papers reporting original research, innovative contributions or experience related to dynamic languages, their implementation and application. Accepted Papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• Innovative language features and implementation techniques
• Development and platform support, tools
• Interesting applications
• Domain-oriented programming
• Very late binding, dynamic composition, and runtime adaptation
• Reflection and meta-programming
• Software evolution
• Language symbiosis and multi-paradigm languages
• Dynamic optimization
• Hardware support
• Experience reports and case studies
• Educational approaches and perspectives
• Object-oriented, aspect-oriented, and context-oriented programming

Submissions and proceedings

We invite original contributions that neither have been published previously nor are under review by other refereed events or publications. Research papers should describe work that advances the current state of the art. Experience papers should be of broad interest and should describe insights gained from substantive practical applications. The program committee will evaluate each contributed paper based on its relevance, significance, clarity, length, and originality.

Papers should be of a length appropriate to their content: a shorter paper may be sufficient to describe a smaller but still significant result, and no paper will be rated poorly solely based on its length.

Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

Papers are to be submitted electronically at http://www.easychair.org/conferences?conf=dls12 in PDF format. Submissions should not exceed 12 pages and need to use the ACM format, templates for which can be found at http://drupal.sigplan.org/Resources/Author.

The Virtual World Framework
David A. Smith (Lockheed Martin Global Training and Logistics, USA)
(presentation, 6.4 MB)

The Virtual World Framework (VWF) is a fast, light-weight Web-based architecture for creating and distributing secure, scalable, component-based collaborative virtual spaces. It leverages existing Web-based standards, infrastructure, and emerging technologies with the intent of establishing a powerful yet simple to use platform that is built on top of the next generation of Web browsers. These technologies include HTML 5 – a significant upgrade in expressive power for the Web; WebGL – an integrated 3D graphics capability; WebSockets – providing a full TCP/IP connection between the client and server; JavaScript – the programming language of the Web; and XMPP – the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (Jabber).

The VWF will be particularly focused on portable and mobile platforms, as well as scalable, ad-hoc network infrastructure such as cloud computing. It is a zero-install platform, with additional software components added dynamically as required. VWF spaces can be embedded in virtually any application including Web pages and emails. Further, VWF spaces can embed existing applications and browsers.

The VWF will be deployed as an open source platform to ensure world-wide adoption.

David Alan Smith is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who has focused on interactive 3D and using 3D as a basis for new user environments and entertainment for over thirty years. His specialty is system design and advanced user interfaces. He is a pioneer in 3D graphics, robotics, telepresence, artificial intelligence and augmented reality (AR). He creates world-class teams and ships impossible products.

Smith is currently Chief Innovation Officer and Lockheed Martin Senior Fellow at Lockheed Martin Global Training and Logistics, where he is focused on next generation human centric computing and collaboration platforms. Since joining Lockheed Martin he has developed a number of key technologies including extreme wide field of view lenses for AR, and was the designer of the Department of Defense Virtual World Framework a WebGL collaboration system that will act as a common platform for training across all of the services in the Department of Defense. He created the HoloWall, a wall-sized teleconference/collaboration platform. He won the Lockheed Martin GTL Inventor of the Year for the last two years (every year he has been eligible).

Before joining Lockheed Martin, Smith was the chief architect of the Croquet Project, an open source virtual world collaboration platform where he worked with Alan Kay (Turing Award winner, father of the personal computer, inventor of object oriented programming, and creator of the Dynabook), Andreas Raab, and David P. Reed (architect of TCP/IP). Smith was later CTO and co-founder of Teleplace, Inc. providing a collaboration platform developed specifically for enterprises based on Croquet.

In 1987, Smith created The Colony, the very first realtime 3D adventure game/shooter and the precursor to today’s first-person shooters. The game was developed for the Apple Macintosh and won the “Best Adventure Game of the Year” award from MacWorld Magazine. In 1989, Smith used the technologies developed for the game to create a virtual set and virtual camera system that was used by James Cameron for the movie The Abyss. Based upon this experience, Smith founded Virtus Corporation in 1990 and developed Virtus Walkthrough, the first real-time 3D design application for personal computers. Virtus Walkthrough won the very first MacWorld/MacUser Breakthrough Product of the Year. Fred Brooks, another Turing award winner and the man that decided there would be 8 bits in a byte was an adviser and member of the board at Virtus.

Smith also co-founded several other companies including Red Storm Entertainment with author Tom Clancy, Timeline Computer Entertainment with author Michael Crichton where he was CEO, and Neomar, a wireless enterprise infrastructure company.

David has been happily married to Teri for 28 years. They have four children. He graduated in 1981 from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics.