Large open-source software projects involve developers with a wide variety of backgrounds and expertise. Such software projects furthermore include many internal APIs that developers must understand and use properly. According to the intended purpose of these APIs, they are more or less frequently used, and used by developers with more or less expertise. In this paper, we study the impact of usage patterns and developer expertise on the rate of defects occurring in the use of internal APIs. For this preliminary study, we focus on memory management APIs in the Linux kernel, as the use of these has been shown to be highly error prone in previous work. We study defect rates and developer expertise, to consider e.g., whether widely used APIs are more defect prone because they are used by less experienced developers, or whether defects in widely used APIs are more likely to be fixed.

An important characteristic of Service-Oriented Architectures is that clients do not depend on the service implementation's internal assignment of methods to objects. It is perhaps the most important technical characteristic that differentiates them from more common object-oriented solutions. This characteristic makes clients and services malleable, allowing them to be rearranged at run-time as circumstances change. That improvement in malleability is impaired by requiring clients to direct service requests to particular services. Ideally, the clients are totally oblivious to the service structure, as they are to aspect structure in aspect-oriented software. Removing knowledge of a method implementation's location, whether in object or service, requires re-defining the boundary line between programming language and middleware, making clearer specification of dependence on protocols, and bringing the transaction-like concept of failure scopes into language semantics as well. This paper explores consequences and advantages of a transition from object-request brokering to service-request brokering, including the potential to improve our ability to write more parallel software.

Enforcing security policies to distributed systems is difficult, in particular, when a system contains untrusted components. We designed AspectKE*, a distributed AOP language based on a tuple space, to tackle this issue. In AspectKE*, aspects can enforce access control policies that depend on future behavior of running processes. One of the key language features is the predicates and functions that extract results of static program analysis, which are useful for defining security aspects that have to know about future behavior of a program. AspectKE* also provides a novel variable binding mechanism for pointcuts, so that pointcuts can uniformly specify join points based on both static and dynamic information about the program. Our implementation strategy performs fundamental static analysis at load-time, so as to retain runtime overheads minimal. We implemented a compiler for AspectKE*, and demonstrate usefulness of AspectKE* through a security aspect for a distributed chat system.

SDL in der 1996 standardisierten Sprachversion ist zur Zeit die im Telekommunikationsbereich am weitesten verbreitete Sprache zur Spezifikation von Protokollen. Ein wesentlicher Aspekt der Sprachentwicklung seit 1988 ist auch die Verfügbarkeit einer formalen Basis semantischer Konzepte. Für das Datenkonzept der Sprache wurde auf die algebraischen Technik ACT ONE zurückgegriffen. Obwohl Anspruch als auch praktischer Wert von SDL in der Ausführbarkeit als Spezifikationstechnik liegt, wird dieses gerade durch das verwendete Datenmodell beeinträchtigt. Verdeckt wird dieses Problem durch die Bereitstellung von vordefinierten Datentypen. Durch die Erweiterung von SDL um objektorientierte Konzepte im Jahr 1992 und durch die allgemein wachsende Bedeutung der Daten in Protokollbeschreibungen treten die vorhandenen Sprachprobleme bei den Daten immer mehr in der Vordergrund. Individuelle Lösungen zur Spezifikation von Daten in verfügbaren SDL-Werkzeugen sind die Folge. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden sowohl die praxismotivierten Unzulänglichkeiten als auch die formalen Unstimmigkeiten im SDL-Datenkonzept aufgezeigt. Auf der Grundlage einer systematischen Analyse werden ein allgemeiner Anforderungskatalog und eine Methodik für Veränderungen am Datenkonzept erarbeitet. Zusätzlich werden wichtige Sprachmodifikationen mit dem Schwerpunkten Ausdruckskraft und Ausführbarkeit vorgestellt und bewertet. Es steht somit ein Instrumentarium zur Verfügung, das den unterschiedlichen SDL-Interessengruppen bei der Bewertung und Nutzung von SDL-Veränderungen dienlich ist. Die in der Arbeit vorgestellten Modifikationen des Datenkonzepts basieren auf den langjährigen Erfahrungen des Autors bei der Implementierung und dem Einsatz von Werkzeugen, die mit verschiedenen projektspezifischen Zielstellungen SDL-Beschreibungen in ausführbare Programme überführen. Die Kombination von SDL mit einer weiteren Spezifikationstechnik, ASN.1, spielt hier eine besondere Rolle. Durch die aktive Mitarbeit des Autors bei der SDL-Sprachstandardisierung werden in der Arbeit auch Vorschläge präsentiert, die über das Potential der vorhandenen Werkzeuge hinausgehen. Das schließt beispielsweise die Bewertung der neuen, in der Praxis noch nicht etablierten, SDL-Version aus dem Jahr 2000 mit ein. / SDL in the language version which was standardized in 1996 is the most-used language in the telecommunication domain for the specification of protocols today. An essential aspect of the language development since 1998 is the availability of a formal basis for semantic concepts. The algebraic technique ACT ONE is used for the data concept of the language. Although the requirement and the practical value of SDL is the execution a specification technique, this is impaired straight by the used data model. The problem is hidden by the supply of pre-defined data types. Because of the introduction of object oriented concepts in 1992 and because of the generally increasing importance of data for the protocol description the existing language problems are taking more and more attention. Individual solutions for the specification of data are the consequence with available SDL tools. In the presented document are pointed out the praxis motivated inadequacies as well as the formal discrepancy of the data concept. A general requirement catalogue and a methodology are designed for language modifications based on a systematic inspection of the SDL data concept. Furthermore important language modifications are introduced and evaluated with the focus to expression power and to execution. Instruments are provided thus, which are helpful to different SDL interest groups for the evaluation and for the application of SDL modifications. In the document presented data modifications are based on years of experience of the author in the implementation and application of tools that compile SDL specifications with different project-specific objectives into executable programs. The combination of SDL with a further specification technology, ASN.1, plays an important role here. Because of the active role of the author in the SDL standardization process also suggestions are presented going beyond the potential of the existing tools. That includes for example the evaluation of the new, in practice not yet established SDL version, published in 2000.