BCLASSES - A CONSTRUCT AND METHOD FOR MODELING COOPERATIVE OBJECT BEHAVIOR

Current object-oriented (OO) modelling techniques emphasise the static aspects of data objects. Dynamics in general and collaborations betwe en objects in particular tend to be poorly supported and are often tre ated separately. A full understanding of an object is hindered if we c annot easily grasp what it can do as well as what it is. We require a way of expressing collaborations. Our approach abstracts collaboration s and suggests a method of integrating these abstractions into mainstr eam OO data definition languages (DDLs) thereby adding new modelling p rimitives. We argue that these are closer to real-world views of objec ts and are therefore more useful than the modelling contrivances in cu rrent use. We demonstrate how these primitives may be translated into DDLs which are easily mapped onto OO programming languages. (C) 1997 E lsevier Science B.V.