Contexts and Views in Object-Oriented Languages

  • Authors:
  • Renate Motschnig-Pitrik

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • CONTEXT '99 Proceedings of the Second International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

The object-oriented paradigm views systems as being composed of objects that model real-world entities. Objects sharing the same properties and responsibilities are categorized under one class. However, object oriented languages, in general, lack means that allow objects to be grouped on extrinsic grounds, such as concerning some specific topic of interest, being relevant to a particular user group, or being dependent on changes made to other objects. Also, object-oriented (OO) languages do not allow objects of the same class to exhibit relativized structure and behavior, for example in order to meet specific user needs. View mechanisms developed for OO databases address the above issues, although, as will be argued, to a limited degree only. Therefore, this paper proposes a context mechanism for OO languages that extends the functionality of views. It will be shown in which way the context mechanism can deal with issues such as relativized structure and behavior of objects, relativized method execution, content-based authorization, and propagation of changes across contexts.