A Comparison of Role Mechanisms in Object-Oriented Modeling.
Gerti Kappel, Werner Retschitzegger, Wieland Schwinger · 1998
. In most object-oriented languages and systems, objects must belong to a single most specific class. Relaxing this requirement, also known as role modeling, has been proposed by several research groups independently. To shed some light on the similarities and differences of the proposed solutions we provide an overview and comparison thereof in this paper. 1. Introduction Object-oriented modeling and development has left research laboratories and is widely used in industry. Not least since Aksit's and Bergmans' paper at OOPSLA'92 [Aksi92] several problems, however, with object-oriented modeling are known and solutions thereof are sought. One of the problems, the lack of adequate object evolution mechanisms - also known as role modeling - has attracted the attention of several research groups. Meanwhile different proposals for extending the traditional object model with role mechanisms have been published. To be able to reason about the different approaches an overview and comparison ...