The TOOLS conference series started in 1989 and, over the following 15 years, held 45 sessions: TOOLS EUROPE, TOOLS USA, TOOLS PACIFIC, TOOLS CHINA and TOOLS EASTERN EUROPE. TOOLS played a major role in the spread of object-oriented and component technologies; many seminal software conceptsnowtakenforgrantedwere?rstdiscussedatTOOLS,takingadvantage of the informal, application-oriented, technically intense and marketing-free - mosphere of the conference. Invited speakers have included countless luminaries of science and industry. Afteraninterruptionoffouryears,TOOLSstartedagaininJune2007,hosted by ETH Zurich with great success. TOOLS has broadened its scope beyond the original topics of object technology and component-based development to encompass all modern, practical approaches to software development. In doing so, it kept with the traditional TOOLS spirit of technical excellence, focus on practicality, combination of theory and applications, and reliance on the best experts from academia and industry. The2008editionoftheconferencewasagainheldatETHZurich,andcont- uedtore?ectTOOLS'sfundamentaltradition.Thisyear,TOOLSwasco-located with two other distinct-but-related conferences: the International Conference on ModelTransformation(ICMT),with astrongfocus onmodel-drivenengineering and,inparticular,modeltransformationtechnologyandtheory;andtheInter- tionalConferenceonSoftwareEngineeringforO?shoreandOutsourcedDevel- ment (SEAFOOD). This co-location, combined with three excellent workshops (on Web 2.0 Pattern Mining, Business Support and MDA, and FAMIX and Moosein SoftwareEngineering)and?ve tutorials,gavethe TOOLSweekan - paralleledprogramofpracticalandtheoreticaltalks,andafantasticopportunity for researchers and practitioners in software development to network. The TOOLS week of conferences was further distinguished by a number of excellent keynote speakers: Michael Brodie (Verizon), John Mylopoulos (U- versity of Trento and the University of Toronto), Erik Meijer (Microsoft), and the ICMT keynote speaker Krzysztof Czarnecki(University of Waterloo). These speakers re?ect the TOOLS themes of practicality, combination of theory and application, and substantial expertise.
