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Using roles in Java
Author(s) -
Schrefl Michael,
Thalhammer Thomas
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.571
Subject(s) - java , computer science , programming language , class (philosophy) , semantics (computer science) , set (abstract data type) , object oriented programming , representation (politics) , real time java , object (grammar) , generics in java , domain (mathematical analysis) , java annotation , artificial intelligence , mathematics , politics , political science , law , mathematical analysis
Using roles in object‐oriented design leads to a more natural representation of a given problem domain. Despite a lot of research into role–based systems, there is still a gap between conceptual representations of roles and the usage of roles in strongly typed object‐oriented programming languages such as C++ or Java. Since these languages associate classes and their instances exclusively and permanently, representing evolving objects that may take on different roles over time is difficult without special support: (i) entities must be reclassified any time they evolve and (ii) class hierarchies may grow exponentially if entities may take on several independent roles. This article shows how role hierarchies can be easily implemented in Java. It introduces the Java Role Package, which provides a set of classes to support handling of evolving objects without modifying the semantics of Java itself. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.