Proceedings of the 4th workshop on Domain-specific aspect languages

It is our great pleasure to host the fourth edition of the Domain-Specific Aspect Languages workshop (DSAL09), as part of the eight International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD09). The tendency to raise the abstraction level in programming languages towards a particular domain is also a major driving force in the research domain of aspect-oriented programming languages. The DSAL workshop series aims to bring the research communities of domain-specific language engineering and domain-specific aspect design together. In the editions held at GPCE06/OOPSLA06 and AOSD07 we approached domain-specific aspect languages both from a design and a language implementation point of view. At AOSD08 we explicitly invited contributions of work on adding domain-specific extensions (DSXs) to general-purpose aspect languages (GPALs). We continue this trend for this edition as the focus on language embedding raises specific issues for language designers, such as proper symbiosis between, and composition of, DSXs. The workshop Call For Papers sought contributions related to domain-specific aspect languages, more particularly (but not limited to): design of DSALs and DSXs successful DSALs, DSXs and their applications issues in both design and implementation of DSALs and DSXs methodologies and tools suitable for creating DSALs and DSXs semantics and composition of DSALs and DSXs disciplined approaches for invasive metaprogramming error reporting in DSALs and debugging of DSALs approaches for composable language embeddings mechanisms for interaction detection and handling in DSALs theoretical foundations for DSALs analysis about the specificity spectrum in aspect languages key challenges for future work in the area This year we accepted 5 papers for presentation and publication, 3 short papers and 2 technical papers. We would like to thank all paper submitters for contributing to the work on domain-specific aspect languages, the authors of accepted papers for providing the discussion material for this year, and last but not least the program committee for their swift reviews.