Composable Encapsulation Policies
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Given the importance of encapsulation to object-oriented programming, it is surprising to note that mainstream object-oriented languages offer only limited and fixed ways of encapsulating methods. Typically one may only address two categories of clients, users and heirs, and one must bind visibility and access rights at an early stage. This can lead to inflexible and fragile code as well as clumsy workarounds. We propose a simple and general solution to this problem in which encapsulation policies can be specified separately from implementations. As such they become first-class composable entities that can be reused by different classes. We present a detailed analysis of the problem with encapsulation and visibility mechanisms in mainstream OO languages, we introduce our approach in terms of a simple model, and we evaluate how our approach compares with existing approaches. We also assess the impact of incorporating encapsulation policies into Smalltalk and discuss some implementation issues.
Date Issued
2004-06
Publication Type
Conference Item
Language(s)
en
Author(s)
Schärli, Nathanael | |
Wuyts, Roel |
Additional Credits
Journal
ECOOP: European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming. Proceedings
Publisher
Springer Verlag
ISBN
978-3-540-22159-3
Title of Event
Access(Rights)
restricted