Special Issues in Object-Oriented Programming: Workshop Reader of the 10th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming

As object-oriented technology matures, many researchers and practitioners in the '00' community shift their focus. Interest in yet-to-be-resolved "core;' issues of the "what and how" of object-orientation remain a field for whole-hearted language ex­perts, but more and more emphasis is put on "making 00 happen". As to the core issues, conferences like OOPSLA and ECOOP are still prolific of advancements. Sure, some of these advancements give raise to fears that the unprec­edented simplicity and cleanness of 00 might be sacrificed on the altars of featurism or universality. On the other hand, advancements will soon become urgently needed as the merge of computer science, telecommunications, and multimedia will greatly influence the nature of our software. Just as an exarnple, this will challenge a very fundamental concept of 00, namely connectionless i.e. memoryless inter-object communication [2]. In this book, we want to concentrate on the increasing shift mentioned, coined above with the term "making 00 happen". In this context, three axes of concerns seem to be predominant: Specifics of application domains: what kinds of domain-specific object-oriented extensions, pre-built components, tools and resources are needed so support ef­ficient application development? Responses to new challenges: what kinds of domain-independent methods and means can be offered to meet upcoming challenges of software development? Technology-Transfer: how can we increase the quality and efficiency of the pro­cess of conveying the 00 technology (first of all, into the "heads" of the soft­ware engineers and project managers), and how do we meet additional problems at the process sink (the industry) which the source (research, academia) did not pay attention to? Interestingly enough, Adele Goldberg's keynote at ECOOP'96 [I] focussed on this gap.