Multitudes of Objects: First Implementation and Case Study for Java

Summary, in English

In object-oriented programs, the relationship of an object to

many objects is usually implemented using indirection through a collection.

This is in contrast to a relationship to one object, which is usually

implemented directly. However, using collections for relationships to many

objects does not only mean that accessing the related objects always requires

accessing the collection first, it also presents a lurking maintenance

problem that manifests itself when a relationship needs to be changed from

to-one to to-many or vice versa. Continuing our prior work on fixing this

problem, we show how we have extended the Java 7 programming language

with multiplicities, that is, with expressions that evaluate to a number of

objects not wrapped in a container, and report on the experience we have

gathered using these multiplicities in a case study.

• Author: Friedrich Steimann; Jesper Öqvist; Görel Hedin
• Department/s: Department of Computer Science; ELLIIT: the Linköping-Lund initiative on IT and mobile communication; eSSENCE: The e-Science Collaboration; Software Development and Environments
• Publishing year: 2014
• Language: English
• Pages: 1-33
• Publication/Series: Journal of Object Technology
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 5
• Full text: - 411 kB; Download statistics
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.5381/jot.2014.13.5.a1
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: ETH, Zürich
• Topic: Computer Science
• Keywords: Java; Multiplicities; Compiler Design; Language Design; Programming Language Design
• Status: Published
• Project: Contributions to Declarative Implementation of Static Program Analysis; ELLIIT LU P05: Scalable Language Tools for Cyber-Physical Systems
• Research group: LUCAS
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1660-1769