Featherweight Wrap Java: wrapping objects and methods
Lorenzo Bettini, bettini@dsi.unifi.it Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino
Sara Capecchi, capecchi@dmi.unict.it Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università di Catania
Elena Giachino, giachino@di.unito.it Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino
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Abstract
This work has been partially supported by the MIUR project EOS-DUE.
We present a language extension, which integrates in a Java like language a mechanism for dynamically extending object behaviors without changing their type. Our
approach consists in moving the addition of new features from class (static) level to
object (dynamic) level: the basic features of entities (representing their structure)
are separated from the additional ones (wrapper classes whose instances represent
run-time added behaviors). At run-time, these entities can be dynamically composed
by instantiating wrapper objects which are attached to basic entities. Wrappers permit specializing (wrapping) methods at run-time: the method of the wrapper will be
automatically executed after the method of the wrapped objects, using a delegation
mechanism. Furthermore, wrapped methods can return values and values returned by
the wrapped methods are transparently made available in the wrapper methods. We
formalize our extension by adding the new constructs to Featherweight Java and we
prove that the core language so extended (Featherweight Wrap Java) is type safe.
Note: Due to the typographical sophistication of this article, no HTML version is available. Please use the PDF version.
About the authors
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Lorenzo Bettini is a Researcher in Computer Science at Dipartimento di Informatica,
University of Torino, Italy. His research focuses on theory, extension
and implementation of mobile code and object-oriented languages, and on distributed
applications.
He can be reached at bettini@dsi.unifi.it or http://www.lorenzobettini.it
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Sara Capecchi is a research fellow in Computer Science at Dipartimento di
Matematica e Informatica, Università di Catania, Italy. Her research interests
are types, calculi and extensions for object-oriented languages. She can be
reached at capecchi@dmi.unict.it. |
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Elena Giachino is a PhD student in Computer Science at Dipartimento di Informatica,
Università di Torino, Italy, and at Laboratoire PPS, Université Paris
VII, France. Her research interests are types and calculi for object-oriented languages
and concurrent processes. She can be reached at giachino@di.unito.it. |
Cite this article as follows: Lorenzo Bettini, Sara Capecchi, Elena Giachino: "Featherweight Wrap Java: wrapping objects
and methods", in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 7, no. 2, Special Issue
OOPS Track at SAC 2007, February 2008, pp. 5-29, http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2008_02/article1/
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