I wish to next thank the authors who have submitted their work for publication and have shared their insights with the world-wide object technology community that JOT reaches.

As we enter our second year of publication, your written feedback can help guide us to make JOT better serve your needs. With our queue of papers waiting for publication still relatively small, the time from acceptance to publication continues to be relatively short. Authors with ideas related to a Guest Column are always welcome to contact me (rswiener@acm.org).

Columnist Anthony Simons’ sixth column dealing with object-oriented type theory focuses on how well several well-known and popular OO languages do with respect to this theory. Many will find this installment provocative and informative. This regular column is joined by freshly minted regular columns contributed by Won Kim, James Odell, Donald Firesmith and Mahesh Dodani. I have contributed another Educator’s Corner column that is the first in a series dealing with the celebrated Traveling Salesman Problem using a Java-based single-threaded, and later a multi-threaded and distributed solution. I welcome Ramnath and Dathan’s Guest Column on patterns again focused on the education community.

Charles Ashbacher has provided us with another book review in this issue. In addition, we have another software review.

This issue contains five feature-length papers dealing with object-architecture and databases. I believe you will find them interesting and useful.