Member-Group Relationships Among Objects

Aspect-Oriented Software is a broad term, encompassing several different views on the nature of the aspects and the relationships between aspects and objects. Attaching aspects to objects is one way of forming a group. While there are many useful patterns of interaction, e.g. strategies[2], decorators, and the like, we focus on groups in which the group delegates to members to obtain behavior and the members may either perform their own behavior or delegate to the group. Using issues of behavior, this paper explores and classifies the relationships between objects and groups of objects in which they may participate as a first step in laying a foundation for unifying these different views as special cases of a common framework.