An introduction for developers who need practical information to make the significant shift to aspect-oriented development.

– Those who want to learn about AOM ?nd in this special issue a concise collection of descriptions of solid and mature AOM approaches. They only have to take the time to understand one case study in order to appreciate the sample models shown in all papers. – Those who want to apply AOM for a particular purpose and are looking for the most appropriate AOM technique can use the papers presented in this specialissue to identify the mostpromisingapproach(es).By identifying similarities between their problem and the case study they should be able to determine candidate AOM approaches easily. – Those working on their own AOM approach can readily identify approaches that were able to handle concerns that their own approach is not able to handle elegantly. This stimulates cross-fertilization between approaches and collaborative research. – Thoseengineering researchersthat areworkingon enhancing softwaredev- opment processes can use the example models presented in this special issue to understand the potential bene?ts of using AOM techniques at di?erent phases of the software development life-cycle.

This journal is devoted to all facets of aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) techniques in the context of all phases of the software life cycle, from requirements and design to implementation, maintenance and evolution. The focus is on approaches for systematic identification, modularization, representation and composition of crosscutting concerns, i.e., the aspects and evaluation of such approaches and their impact on improving quality attributes of software systems.

The definitive reference on the emerging and dynamic field of Aspect - Oriented Software Development (AOSD).

The six papers collected here, from the journal devoted to all facets of aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) techniques, includes three submitted through the regular channels and three that focus on the area of aspects, dependencies and interactions.

This volume, the 8th in the Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development series, contains two regular submissions and a special section, consisting of five papers, on the industrial applications of aspect technology. The regular papers describe a framework for constructing aspect weavers, and patterns for reusable aspects. The special section begins with an invited contribution on how AspectJ is making its way from an exciting new hype topic to a valuable technology in enterprise computing. The remaining four papers each cover different industrial applications of aspect technology, which include a telecommunication platform, a framework for embedding user assistance in independently developed applications, a platform for digital publishing, and a framework for program code analysis and manipulation.

The 19th Annual Meeting of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming—ECOOP 2005—took place during the last week of July in Glasgow, Scotland, UK. This volume includes the refereed technical papers p- sented at the conference, and two invited papers. It is traditional to preface a volume of proceedings such as this with a note that emphasizes the importance of the conference in its respective ?eld. Although such self-evaluations should always be taken with a large grain of salt, ECOOP is undisputedly the pre- inent conference on object-orientation outside of the United States. In its turn, object-orientationis today’s principaltechnology not only for programming,but also for design, analysisand speci?cation of softwaresystems. As a consequence, ECOOP has expanded far beyond its roots in programming to encompass all of these areas of research—whichis why ECOOP has remained such an interesting conference. But ECOOP is more than an interesting conference. It is the nucleus of a technical and academic community, a community whose goals are the creation and dissemination of new knowledge. Chance meetings at ECOOP have helped to spawn collaborations that span the boundaries of our many subdisciplines, bring together researchers and practitioners, cross cultures, and reach from one side of the world to the other. The ubiquity of fast electronic communication has made maintaining these collaborations easier than we would have believed possible only a dozen years ago. But the role of conferences like ECOOP in establishing collaborations has not diminished.