By Christine Mingins and Bertrand Meyer
Guest editors

This third issue of JOT inaugurates a tradition which, we hope, will be long-lived. The TOOLS conferences have been running for more than ten years now, providing the world of object and components with an international forum to discuss advanced techniques of software construction, and a meeting place for everyone interested, with a particular focus on applications. Since the aims of TOOLS and those of JOT are so close, it was natural to choose the latter as the publication venue, from now on, for the former. Starting with TOOLS USA 2002, the proceedings of TOOLS will be published as special issues of JOT. This is in addition to the regular bimonthly issue schedule, which will continue with the September-October issue, available as always on the first day, September 1st, with the expected assortment of fascinating columns and articles.

TOOLS USA 2002 was held in Santa Barbara July 28 to August 2. Like most conferences these days it was smaller than usual, but this in no way - quite to the contrary, in fact - affected the quality. The twelve papers published here reflect the themes advertised for the conference and the current interests of workers in the field. A whole set of presentations are devoted to Design by Contract techniques, with applications to various programming languages. Specification is another strong focus among these papers. A paper stream is devoted to CASE tools and environments, showing some of the state in the art in what we propose to developers.

The next TOOLS will be TOOLS PACIFIC 2003, tentatively scheduled for the week of March 17 in Singapore. Announcements will be reachable from the (soon to come) News page of jot.fm.

We hope you enjoy this snapshot of TOOLS USA 2002.