I-Java: An Extension of Java with Incomplete Objects and Object Composition

Object composition is often advocated as a more flexible alternative to standard class inheritance since it takes place at run-time, thus permitting the behavior of objects to be specialized dynamically. In this paper we present I-Java, an extension of the Java language with a form of incomplete objects, i.e., objects with some missing methods which can be provided at run-time by composition with another (complete) object. Therefore, we can exploit object composition as a linguistic construct, instead of resorting to a manual implementation. This work builds on our theoretical model of incomplete objects, which was proved typesafe.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SOCO
• Authors: Lorenzo Bettini, Viviana Bono, Erica Turin
• Keywords: Incomplete Objects, Object Composition, SOCO 2009, Standard Class Inheritance