Abstract
Recently, along with continuous changes and improvements of business processes, many industrial software systems are faced with various kinds of changes. Especially, a change in the system design may have serious impacts on the whole software products. In this paper, we focus on a kind of structural change in the system design which requires a large amount of code modification. In a real-world object-oriented program, many code fragments to access a certain object/objects tend to be scattered in the whole program. If the structure of the system is drastically changed, then such widely scattered code fragments should be consistently modified and generally such a modification becomes excessively hard. To address the problem, we propose a language mechanism which protects the access codes from the structural change of the system. Based on the language mechanism, we have also designed a programming language FrameJ and implemented a FrameJ-to-Java compiler Furthermore, we have reimplemented an existing Java application on FrameJ for a case study. Hereby, we can expect that our language mechanism is feasible and will improve the adaptability and maintainability of large scale programs.
