Dear readers,

Welcome to the fourth issue of the Journal of Object Technology (JOT). I am especially grateful to our columnists for coming through under difficult deadline pressure, often in the middle of summer holidays, in order to get their work into this issue of JOT. We have an unusually large collection of outstanding columns in this issue spanning a wide range of topic areas. I welcome the new regular columnist, Donald Firesmith who shall write about OO Requirements Engineering.

Richard Wiener,
Editor- in-Chief

I believe by now you, our readers, can see the depth and breadth of this exciting international journal. Please browse the earlier issues if you are a new reader. I continue to invite our readership to send me manuscripts (rswiener@acm.org) for inclusion in future issues. We welcome papers that deal with OO languages, components, agents, OO education and training, OOA, OOD, patterns, OODBMS, methodologies and anything else related to the world of object technology. Your submissions shall be reviewed in a timely manner and published as soon as possible.

Our four reviewed feature-length papers again hail from all over the world (Venezuela, Taiwan, Spain and Australia) dealing with topics almost as diverse as the countries of origin.

I look forward to continuing to receiving your letters and articles for publication in future issues of this journal. Thanks.

With best regards

Richard Wiener
Editor-in-Chief