Modeling Behavior with Personalities
Luis Blando, Karl J. Lieberherr, Mira Mezini · 1999
Decoupling behavior modeling from a specific inheritance hierarchy has become one of the challenges for object-oriented software engineering. The goal is to encapsulate behavior on its own, and yet be able to freely apply it to a given class structure. We claim that standard object-oriented languages do not directly address this problem and propose the concept of Personalities as a design and programming artifice to model stand alone behavior that embodies what we have termed microframework style of programming. Allowing behavior to stand alone enables its reuse in different places in an inheritance hierarchy. Dynamic personalities, a variation to the basic ideas that helps, among other things, with the object migration problem, is also discussed. We present a potential Personalities implementation by extending the Java programming language. 1. Introduction If we take a bird's eye view of any given software system, we find that its sole purpose is to perform a function for its user. ...