Object-oriented Software Construction Research Articles

Studies in object-oriented programming backbone implementations

This work is a combination of conceptual and hands on based study aimed at laying a foundation for practical Object-Oriented software construction. First it presents a conceptual study of a number of backbone concepts of modern Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) languages. Secondly, it attempts to demonstrate real-life implementations of these concepts using Python Programming Language. This work touches on practical issues on Class and Object Creation, especially on the syntax and creation, and demystifies the subject matter using a simple table of rules. The OOP concept of Inheritance was studied, with focus on the three major types of inheritance. The self-argument, and constructors were studied, with focus on the three constructors - default, parameterized, and non-parameterized constructors. A brief discussion, and pictorial illustration was also made on the disparity between normal mathematical functions and OOP method calls. Further areas of studies are the concept of overriding between the parent and child class, as well as the OOP puzzle commonly known as Diamond Problem, including code segment and diagrammatic illustration of Python-based solutions. There are a number of other back-bone concepts in OOP not covered in this study, such as Encapsulation, Abstraction, Meta-Programming, among others, which will form areas of focus in future studies. Effort was made to enhance the overall presentation through practical illustrations using source codes, annotated diagrams, and discussions. It is hoped that this work will be very useful to researchers and other practitioners in Object Oriented implementations.

Composition of Self-Adapting Components for Customizable Systems

Software systems grow each day in size and complexity. In an effort to manage increasing complexity and to maximize the reuse of code, the software engineering community has, in recent years, put considerable effort into the design and development of component-based software methodologies and tools. Inspired by the notion of connector (Allen and Garlan (1994) Formal connectors. Technical report CMU-CS-94-115, Carnegie Mellon University, PA, USA) in software architecture and the ‘Design by Contract’ metaphor proposed by Meyer ((2000) Object-Oriented Software Construction. Prentice Hall, USA), this paper presents a methodology for component composition, coordination and dynamic adaptation. Our proposal is based on connectors enriched with contracts, making software architecture more explicit at the implementation level. Those connectors will be components in our system. Therefore, we can use subtyping techniques for connectors development and we could offer a set of generic connectors implementing standard behavior patterns. In addition, the connectors will use semantic web techniques and a Prolog machine to solve functional adaptation problems, such us name or parameters mismatching of a service, at run-time.

The Start of an Eiffel Standard.

The launching of the JOT provides a welcome opportunity to resume the Eiffel column that ran for many years in JOOP from 1998 (edited first by Rock Howard from whom I took over in 1998). It will run pretty much like its predecessor, with a mix of contributions by guest columnists and by me, and a mix of topics — from language matters to methodological issues of object-oriented software construction to reports on industry projects — that I hope will be of interest not only to Eiffel users but also to many others.

Simulating multiple inheritance and generics in Java

This paper presents Java language from an object-oriented software construction perspective. It explains the implications of banning generics and multiple inheritance of classes, and explores the patterns and the idioms used by the Java designers and programmers to redeem their benefits. The paper also discusses an alternative to multiple inheritance, as incorporated in Lava, which extends Java with constructs for type-safe automatic forwarding.

A WWW software development environment to support cooperative and spread working groups

This article presents a software development environment based on hypertext techniques to support object-oriented software construction performed by cooperative working groups spread all over the world. The environment uses the World-Wide Web to support distributed software development.

Object-oriented software construction at ALS

C++ class libraries have been developed and used for accelerator modeling and machine control at the Advanced Light Source. A class library for accelerator modeling is portable and supports multiple model instances dynamically at run time. A class library for machine control covers fields from virtual devices to simulation studies.

Combined use of languages in object-oriented software construction

This paper argues that a combined use of languages is needed for object-oriented software construction, since no single language can be ideal for all the phases of prototyping, design and implementation. The approach discussed in this paper is based on the combined use of two object-oriented languages. The first of them ( Amore ), a hybrid object and logic-based language, is used for specifications prototyping, whilst the second one, (C++) is used for the final system construction. An automatic tool transforms Amore specifications to C++ code templates which can be manually modified by the programmer. This approach improves time the consuming and error prone activity of manual translation of specifications into code, whilst at the same time improves the quality of the delivered system.

Applying 'design by contract'

Methodological guidelines for object-oriented software construction that improve the reliability of the resulting software systems are presented. It is shown that the object-oriented techniques rely on the theory of design by contract, which underlies the design of the Eiffel analysis, design, and programming language and of the supporting libraries, from which a number of examples are drawn. The theory of contract design and the role of assertions in that theory are discussed.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Lessons from the design of the Eiffel libraries

The nature of programming is changing. Most of the software engineering literature still takes for granted a world of individual projects, where the sole aim is to produce specific software systems in response to particular requirements, little attention being paid to each system's relationship to previous or subsequent efforts. This implicit model seems unlikely to allow drastic improvements in software quality and productivity. Such order-of-magnitude advances will require a process of industrialization, not unlike what happened in those disciplines which have been successful at establishing a production process based on the reuse of quality-standardized components. This implies a shift to a “new culture” [14] whose emphasis is not on projects but instead on components. The need for such a shift was cogently expressed more than 20 years ago by Doug McIlroy in his contribution, entitled Mass-Produced Software Components [10], to the now-famous first conference on software engineering: Software production today appears in the scale of industrialization somewhere below the more backward construction industries. I think its proper place is considerably higher, and would like to investigate the prospects for mass-production techniques in software. [...] My thesis is that the software industry is weakly founded [in part because of] the absence of a software components subindustry [...] A components industry could be immensely successful. Although reuse has enjoyed modest successes since this statement was made, by all objective criteria McIlroy's prophecy has not been fulfilled yet; many technical and non-technical issues had to be addressed before reuse could become a reality on the scale he foresaw. (See [1] and [20] for a survey of current work on reuse.) One important development was needed to make this possible: the coming age of object-oriented technology, which provides the best known basis for reusable software construction. (That the founding document of object-oriented methods, the initial description of Simula 67, was roughly contemporary with McIlroy's paper tends to confirm a somewhat pessimistic version of Redwine and Riddle's contention [18] that “it takes on the order of 15 to 20 years to mature a technology to the point that it can be popularized to the technical community at large.”) Much of the current excitement about object-oriented software construction derives from the growing realization that the shift is now technically possible. This article presents the concerted efforts which have been made to advance the cause of component-based software development in the Eiffel environment [12, 17] through the construction of the Basic Eiffel Libraries. After a brief overview of the libraries, this article reviews the major language techniques that have made them possible (with more background about Eiffel being provided by the sidebar entitled “Major Eiffel Techniques”); it then discusses design issues for libraries of reusable components, the use of inheritance hierarchies, the indexing problem, and planned developments.