Language Support for Component Communication in LayOM

Components, as well as objects, need to be composed in order to achieve required system functionality. Virtually all components require communication with other components, acquaintances, in the course of their operation. Although the conventional object-oriented model is one of the most appropriate paradigms for component-oriented programming, it provides too little support, i.e. based on object names or through pointers, for selecting the acquaintances of an object. This lack of expressiveness reduces the reusability and understandability of an object, since the selection of and communication with acquaintances is implicit in the class specification. In this paper, we analyse the relevant dimensions of object communication and propose a solution in the context of our extended object-oriented model, i.e. the layered object model (LayOM).