Object Acquaintance Selection and Binding

Large object-oriented systems have, at least, four characteristics that complicate object communication, i.e the system is distributed and contains large numbers, e.g. thousands, of objects, objects need to be reallocated at run-time and objects can be replaced by other objects in order to adapt to the dynamic changes in the system. Traditional object communication is based on sending a message to a receiver object known to the sender of the message. At linking or instantiation time, an object establishes its acquaintances through name/class based binding and uses these objects through its life time. If this is too rigid, the software engineer has to implement the binding of objects manually using pointers. In our experiments we found the traditional acquaintance communication semantics too limited and we identified several problems, related to the reusability of objects and selection mechanisms, understandability and expressiveness. We recognised that it is important to separate an ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1998
• Where: TAPOS
• Authors: Jan Bosch
• Keywords: Acquaintance Communication Semantics, Communication, Large Object-oriented Systems, TAPOS 1998