A comparative evaluation of object definition techniques for large prototype systems

Abstract

Although prototyping has long been touted as a potentially valuable software engineering activity, it has never achieved widespread use by developers of large-scale, production software. This is probably due in part to an incompatibility between the languages and tools traditionally available for prototyping (e.g., LISP or Smalltalk) and the needs of large-scale-software developers, who must construct and experiment with large prototypes. The recent surge of interest in applying prototyping to the development of large-scale, production software will necessitate improved prototyping languages and tools appropriate for constructing and experimenting with large, complex prototype systems. We explore techniques aimed at one central aspect of prototyping that we feel is especially significant for large prototypes, namely that aspect concerned with the definition of data objects. We characterize and compare various techniques that might be useful in defining data objects in large prototype systems, after first discussing some distinguishing characteristics of large prototype systems and identifying some requirements that they imply. To make the discussion more concrete, we describe our implementations of three techniques that represent different possibilities within the range of object definition techniques for large prototype systems.