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Object Incompleteness and Dynamic Composition in Java-Like Languages

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Objects, Components, Models and Patterns (TOOLS EUROPE 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 11))

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Abstract

Object composition is often advocated as a more flexible alternative to standard class inheritance since it takes place at run-time, thus permitting the behavior of objects to be specialized dynamically. In this paper we present Incomplete Featherweight Java (IFJ), an extension of Featherweight Java with incomplete objects, i.e., objects that require some missing methods which can be provided at run-time by composition with another (complete) object. Incomplete object usage is disciplined by static typing, therefore the language enjoys type safety (which implies no “message-not-understood” run-time errors).

This work has been partially supported by the MIUR project EOS DUE and by EU Project Software Engineering for Service-Oriented Overlay Computers (SENSORIA, contract IST-3-016004-IP-09).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino,  

    Lorenzo Bettini & Viviana Bono

  2. Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica, Università di Firenze,  

    Betti Venneri

Authors
  1. Lorenzo Bettini
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  2. Viviana Bono
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  3. Betti Venneri
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Richard F. Paige Bertrand Meyer

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Bettini, L., Bono, V., Venneri, B. (2008). Object Incompleteness and Dynamic Composition in Java-Like Languages. In: Paige, R.F., Meyer, B. (eds) Objects, Components, Models and Patterns. TOOLS EUROPE 2008. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 11. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69824-1_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69824-1_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-69823-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69824-1

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