Abstract: While software systems are growing bigger, and the market demands shorter software production cycles, IT companies need more and more extensive reuse of existing components. Additionally, sophisticated reuse scenarios demand flexible components which are able to adapt to different needs. As a result, it is required that all the components are as customizable as possible. In object-oriented (OO) programming languages, the base tool of reuse and customization is inheritance, which is widely known and exploited, however shows its limits when it comes to reuse nested components, which implement their behaviour using other classes instantiated internally. In this paper we present a new proposal that offers a feature for replacing a class with a compatible subclass within a library without the need of modifying its sources. As a result, it increases the possible reuse and the customization scenarios of existing components, with little additional coding required. Our idea is presented as an extension of an arbitrary OO language, however it is studied in more details as an extension of Java called ImpliJava.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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