Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Principles and practice of programming in Java

We are very pleased and proud to present you with the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on the Principles and Practices of Programming in Java (PPPJ 2006). After a short break in 2005, it is good to see that the conference has not only kept its impetus of 2004 but actually has attracted even more submissions and has received increased interest.This year's call for papers resulted in 47 submissions. In our rigorous review process, every submitted paper was carefully examined by at least three program committee members. Ultimately, the committee accepted 17 full papers and 7 short papers, leading to an acceptance rate of 36% for full papers. We are happy to say that the papers selected are of high quality and cover a wide range of topics of interest to the Java community.Due to the support of three major interest groups (ACM SIGAPP, ACM SIGPLAN, and the GI Fachgruppe 2.1.4), we were able to recruit a wide spectrum of specialist reviewers. The program committee consisted of 36 members each with varying backgrounds, expertise, and research areas that covered the wide range of topics of interest to the PPPJ community. In a transparent and discussion-based process, only the best papers were chosen for the conference.