workshops |
sunday |
The volatile nature of contemporary business requirements forces developers to make their applications more configurable, flexible, and adaptable. The era where business rules are buried in Cobol code is coming to an end. Today, users themselves may seek to dynamically change their business rules. Multi-tiered systems often demand that data that the data that move through them carry with them their own descriptions. There have been a number of successful frameworks and applications implemented and delivered in different areas of industry that use domain specific languages, meta-data, good object-oriented design, and flexible implementation of business rules to address these sorts of needs. A system with an "Active Object Model" has an explicit object model that it interprets at run-time. If you change the object model, the system changes its behavior. Business rules can be stored in an active object model that makes it easy to evolve the way a company does their business. Researchers working with reflection and meta-level architectures have been looking at how to make such systems highly configurable. Our goal is to document the techniques and principles that make these systems work. We hope to "mine" these systems and produce a preliminary collection of meta-data and active object system patterns, and help establish a shared vocabulary. Organizer:Joseph
W. Yoder, University of Illinois
at Urbanna-Champaign Michel Tilman, UniSys
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