First Class Relationships In An Object Oriented Language

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First Class Relationships In An Object Oriented Language.pdf

Review

• Provide language level constructs to declare relationships
• relations with attributes & inheritance
• although there are patterns for implementing relations the relation itself gets lost in the implementation
• Diferent aspects of the relation are distributed across various classes
• Important abstractions such as relations must be available at implementation level
• RelJ is a subset of Java
  • can define relations
  • specify attributes
  • create hierarchies

• Relationship instances are first-class runtime objects in RelJ that can contain fields and even methods
• only support relations that are one way. We hope to add relationships that may be travered in both directions safely.
• doesn't give any details of how RelJ could be implemented. Requires considerable extensions to JVM.
• It's possible to have relationships between classes and other relationships. (aggregation in E/R modeling)

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Notes

References

Bibliographic Description

@INPROCEEDINGS{Bierman05first-classrelationships,
    author = {Gavin Bierman},
    title = {First-class relationships in an object-oriented language},
    booktitle = {In ECOOP},
    year = {2005},
    pages = {262--286},
    publisher = {Springer-Verlag}
}