Cooperation Contracts

Project duration
January 1996 - January 1998

Short description

Several objects exhibit collaborative behavior if they act together in answering a message they have received jointly. Collaborative behavior is defined by cooperation contracts which are established between several object classes and which declare a set of cooperative methods. A cooperative method is invoked by a cooperative message sent to a tuple of instances, one for each object class in the cooperation contract. This extends the traditional message passing paradigm which requires the receiver of a message to be a single object only.


Cooperation contracts offer several benefits for behavior modeling in object-oriented database design. Behavior provided by several object classes in concert needs not be dispersed and can be defined in a single place. Therefore, behavior designs become symmetric, better maintainable and better extensible.


Cooperation contracts can easily be made available as beneficial modeling construct in existing object-oriented database management systems by adding a few classes. This project deals with such an extension based on the commercial object-oriented database management system GemStone.


Keywords: multiple polymorphism, collaborative behavior modeling, cooperation contracts, object-oriented database design


Project team
Peter Lang - Project leader (DKE)
Gerti Kappel (Technische Universität Wien)

Publications
M. Schrefl, G. Kappel, P. Lang:
Modeling collaborative behavior using cooperation contracts
In: Journal "Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE)", Vol. 26, No. 2, June 1998, Elsevier Science B.V. (North-Holland), ISSN 0169-023X, pp. 191-224, 1998.

Resources: Implementation in Gemstone