Modeling Behavior with Personalities

Decoupling behavior modeling from a specific inheritance hierarchy has become one of the challenges for objectoriented software engineering. The goal is to encapsulate behavior on its own, and yet be able to freely apply it to a given class structure. We claim that standard objectoriented languages do not directly address this problem and propose the concept of Personalities as a design and programming artifice to model stand alone behavior that embodies what we have termed micro-framework style of programming. Allowing behavior to stand alone enables its reuse in different places in an inheritance hierarchy. The micro-framework style ensures that the semantics are preserved during reuse. We present a potential Personalities implementation by extending the Java programming language.