Reactive Behaviour Support: Themes and Variations

Unlike previous behaviour models, reactive behaviour description includes not only what to execute but also when to execute it. Programming languages, database systems and graphical user interfaces are being enhanced to provide explicit support for reactive behaviour due to the large range of application which naturally express their semantics using this paradigm. This paper presents a common framework in which current alternatives to reactive behaviour support in objectoriented systems can be placed and compared. This framework imposes some clasification features, that suggest some new approaches for the reactive behaviour support.