Proceedings of the International Workshop on Context-Oriented Programming

Context information plays an increasingly important role in our information-centric world. Software systems must adapt to changing contexts over time, and must change even while they are running. Unfortunately, mainstream programming languages and development environments do not support this kind of dynamic change very well, leading developers to implement complex designs to anticipate various dimensions of variability. Starting from this observation, Context-Oriented Programming (COP) has emerged as a solution to directly support variability depending on a wide range of dynamic attributes, making it possible to dispatch run-time behaviour on any property of the execution context. The goal of the 4th International Workshop on Context-Oriented Programming (COP'12) was to further establish context orientation as a common thread to language design, application development, and system support. Several researchers are working on Context-Oriented Programming and related ideas, and implementations ranging from prototypes to mature platform extensions used in commercial deployments have illustrated how multi-dimensional dispatch can indeed be supported effectively to achieve expressive run-time behavioural variations. This is a follow-up event to 3 consecutive successful editions of the workshop at ECOOP 2009, 2010 and 2011, each attracting around 30 participants. The workshop received 5 submissions. Each paper was reviewed by 3 members of the program committee. All of the 5 submissions were selected for presentation at the workshop, and publication in this workshop proceedings.