SPLASH

Welcome to OOPSLA 2005 in San Diego, California, USA, October 16-20, 2005. This is the proceedings of the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, systems, languages, and Applications, which was initiated in 1986. Technical papers present new ideas, new research, or in-depth reflections on languages, systems, and applications, focusing on objects. This year is first time that the technical program has been split into three parts: research papers, which describe substantiated new research or novel technical results, advance the state of the art, or report on significant experience or experimentation; Onward! papers, which describe new paradigms or metaphors in computing, new thinking about objects, new framings of computational problems or systems, and new technologies; and essays, which are explorations of technology and its impacts, presenting in-depth reflections on technology, its relation to human endeavors, and its philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical, r anthropological underpinnings.Each submission was judged on these criteria:

• Technical contribution--how substantial is the contribution

• Novelty--how novel or innovative are the ideas

• Substantiation--how well proven is the contribution

• Presentation--how clearly written and presented is the material

• Argument--how compelling or well-made are the arguments in the paper

• Art/Craft--how well does the paper demonstrate, describe, or promote excellence of artistry or craft in architecture, design, implementation, methodology, or documentation

Each paper was assigned to at least three reviewers. Moreover, each paper and its reviews were further reviewed by the leaders of 16 focus groups (Analysis and Design Methods; Design Patterns; Distributed Systems; Experience with OO Applications and Systems; Frameworks and Components; Languages/Design; Languages/Implementation; Languages/Aspects; Object Databases and Persistence; Object Testing and Metrics; Parallel Systems; Programming Environments; Real-Time Systems; Reflection and Metaobject Models; Software Engineering Practices; Theoretical Foundations) who could assign further reviews. Therefore, each paper had in effect four reviews, with some having as many as nine.Each submitted paper co-authored by a program committee member was held to a much higher standard of review through a specific voting process designed to be auditable by the conference chair; each such paper was reviewed by at least six other committee members, on the basis of strict anonymity. The author of a program committee paper was required to leave the meeting room while the paper was being discussed. This year, five papers were submitted by program committee members and none were accepted.In all, 74 papers were submitted and 32 were accepted. OOPSLA 2005 continues the tradition of presenting well-written, carefully selected papers that should be of lasting value to the programming and object communities. And I hope that the new traditions started this year in pursuit of the themes of Explore / Discover / Understand serve well the community of researchers, practitioners, educations, and software thinkers.