Extending Java to dynamic object behaviors1 1This work has been partially supported by EU within the FET - Global Computing initiative, project AGILE IST-2001-32747 and by MIUR project NAPOLI. The funding bodies are not responsible for any use that might be made of the results presented here.
Lorenzo Bettini, Sara Capecchi, Betti Venneri · Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science · 2003
Class inheritance and dynamic binding are the key features of object-oriented programming and they permit designing and developing complex systems. However, standard class inheritance is essentially static and cannot be directly employed for modeling dynamic object behaviors. In this paper we propose a linguistic extension of Java, called Dec-Java, that is partially inspired by the decorator design pattern. This extension permits easily separating the basic features of objects (that are likely not to change during the application) from their behaviors (that, instead, can be composed dynamically at run-time). Thus, Dec-Java enables a dynamic extension and specialization of object responsibilities.