Law-governed regularities in object systems. Part 1: An abstract model
Naftaly H. Minsky · Theory and Practice of Object Systems · 1996
Regularities, or the conformity to unifying principles, are clearly essential to the comprehensibility and manageability of large systems in general. Yet, regularities do not play an important role in the architecture of conventional software systems. We argue that the main reason for this is that regularities are inherently hard to implement reliably in software by traditional methods, due to their intrinsic globality. This article explores an approach to regularities for object systems which greatly simplifies their implementation, making them more easily employable for taming of the complexities of large-scale software. This approach, which is based on the concept of law-governed architecture (LGA) provides system designers and builders with the means for establishing a wide range of useful regularities simply by declaring them formally and explicitly as the law of the system. Once such a law-governed regularity is declared, it is enforced by the environment in which the system is developed. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.