Object-Oriented Development: Patterns, Interfaces, and Update Semantics

Abstract

Object-Orientation has the potential to significantly improve information system

development productivity through the reuse of code and design components. To achieve

this potential, object patterns having similar update semantics must be recognized and

standard interfaces developed for them. We propose six such patterns and demonstrate

their benefits by developing standard interface templates for each. A developer can analyze

the patterns in an object model and quickly configure interfaces and update methods for

an information system using these templates. These templates are implemented as

meta-classes in Smalltalk as part of SOODAS, a Semantic Object-Oriented Data Access

System, which also supports Entity-Relationship semantics and provides a set-level query

language.