For the past twenty-seven years, the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing has been a primary gathering forum for applied computer scientists, computer engineers, software engineers, and application developers from around the world. SAC 2012 is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP), and is hosted by The Microsoft Research - University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology, Trento, Italy.

Service-Oriented Programming (SOP) is quickly changing our vision of the Web, bringing a paradigmatic shift in the methodologies followed by programmers when designing and implementing distributed systems. Originally, the Web was mainly seen as a means of presenting information to a wide spectrum of people, but SOP is triggering a radical transformation of the Web towards a computational fabric where loosely coupled services interact publishing their interfaces inside dedicated repositories, where they can be discovered by other services and then invoked, abstracting from their actual implementation. Research on SOP is giving strong impetus to the development of new technologies and tools for creating and deploying distributed software.

In the context of this modern paradigm we have to cope with an old challenge, like in the early days of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) when, until key features like encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, and proper design methodologies were defined, consistency in the programming model definition was not achieved. The complex scenario of SOP needs to be clarified on many aspects, both from the engineering and from the foundational points of view.

From the engineering point of view, there are open issues at many levels. Among others, at the system design level, both traditional approaches based on UML and approaches taking inspiration from business process modelling, e.g. BPMN, are used. At the composition level, although WS-BPEL is a de-facto industrial standard, other approaches are appearing, and both the orchestration and choreography views have their supporters. At the description and discovery level there are two separate communities pushing respectively the semantic approach (ontologies, OWL, ...) and the syntactic one (WSDL, ...). In particular, the role of discovery engines and protocols is not clear. In this respect we still lack adopted standards: UDDI looked to be a good candidate, but it is no longer pushed by the main corporations, and its wide adoption seems difficult. Furthermore, a new different implementation platform, the so-called REST services, is emerging and competing with classic Web Services. Finally, features like Quality of Service, security and dependability need to be taken seriously into account, and this investigation should lead to standard proposals.

From the foundational point of view, formalists have discussed widely in the last years, and many attempts to use formal methods for specification and verification in this setting have been made. Session correlation, service types, contract theories and communication patterns are only a few examples of the aspects that have been investigated. Moreover, several formal models based upon automata, Petri nets and algebraic approaches have been developed. However most of these approaches concentrate only on a few features of Service-Oriented Systems in isolation, and a comprehensive approach is still far from being achieved.

The Service-Oriented Architectures and Programming track aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners having the common objective of transforming SOP into a mature discipline with both solid scientific foundations and mature software engineering development methodologies supported by dedicated tools. In particular, we will encourage works and discussions about what SOP still needs in order to achieve its original goal.

Major topics of interest will include:

• Formal methods for specification of Web Services
• Notations and models for Service Oriented Computing
• Methodologies and tools for Service Oriented application design
• Service Oriented Middlewares
• Service Oriented Programming languages
• Test methodologies for Service Oriented applications
• Analysis techniques and tools
• Service systems performance analysis
• Industrial deployment of tools and methodologies
• Standards for Service Oriented Programming
• Service application case studies
• Dependability and Web Services
• Quality of Service
• Security issues in Service Oriented Computing
• Comparisons between different approaches to Services
• Exception handling in composition languages
• Trust and Web Services
• Sustainability and Web Services, Green Computing
• Adaptable Web Services
• Software Product Lines for Services
• Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Service Oriented Computing