Package Templates and programming in the large

Abstract

The OMS-group at the department of Informatics at the University of Oslo has from 2006 to 2012 had a NFR-project called the SWAT-project (Semantics-preserving Weaving – Advancing the Technology). This project was working with new modularization mechanisms for modeling and programming in object oriented languages. One of results from that project, and what this thesis will be about, is a mechanism called Package Templates. Package Templates (or PT for short), is a mechanism that was designed to make it possible to write and use modules containing multiple classes. Its main idea was that it should be possible to extend the classes of such a template in parallel (and do other additions) when such a template is used in a program. In my thesis I will study and evaluate the usefulness of PT and how easy it is to do programming in the large with it (for more information on what aspects we will look at in this thesis see chapter 3). I will therefore write program-libraries and frameworks as separate reusable modules in PT, and evaluate how good the mechanism is for the chosen cases.

The OMS-group at the department of Informatics at the University of Oslo has from 2006 to 2012 had a NFR-project called the SWAT-project (Semantics-preserving Weaving – Advancing the Technology). This project was working with new modularization mechanisms for modeling and programming in object oriented languages. One of results from that project, and what this thesis will be about, is a mechanism called Package Templates. Package Templates (or PT for short), is a mechanism that was designed to make it possible to write and use modules containing multiple classes. Its main idea was that it should be possible to extend the classes of such a template in parallel (and do other additions) when such a template is used in a program. In my thesis I will study and evaluate the usefulness of PT and how easy it is to do programming in the large with it (for more information on what aspects we will look at in this thesis see chapter 3). I will therefore write program-libraries and frameworks as separate reusable modules in PT, and evaluate how good the mechanism is for the chosen cases.