Generic Roles for Increased Reuseability

Abstract: Role-based programming, as in the Object Teams/Java (OT/J) language, aims to improve object-oriented programming with regard to separation of cross-cutting or context-related concerns. Therefore, OT/J introduces class-like modules for roles and context, which connect common classes to build collaborations. How-ever, since role and base objects are directly linked, it implies strong coupling and limited possibilities of reuse. This research aims to create a generic way of expressing connections between a collaboration and its base in order to further decouple modules and enhance their reusability. We introduce a quantification mechanism based on logic meta-programming in Prolog that allows using generic references to declaratively de-fined program elements, which are transformed to build valid OT/J code. We propose that the use of logic meta-variables improves the expressiveness and genericity of role-based programming.