Guest Editorial

Dear Readers,

The ECOOP 2004 workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs (FTfJP) was the fifth in the series of workshops held at ECOOP. Like its predecessors, this workshop attracted a high number of quality submissions. A program committee selected 11 papers in the areas of

• Typing
• JVM implementation and Java compilation
• Invariants
• Specification and verification
• Ownership

The authors of the best workshop papers were invited to submit a full article to this JOT special issue. The accepted papers advance the state of the art in specification, verification, and compilation of both sequential and concurrent object-oriented programs.

We are grateful to the authors for submitting these contributions, to the FTfJP 2004 program committee for reviewing and selecting the submissions, and to our co-organizers of the FTfJP workshop series.