An Original Object-Oriented Approach for Relation Management

In this paper, we deal with the integration of slave-master relations in an object oriented language. The chosen approach consists of implementing relations in a hierarchy of classes. So, we stress a main class which specifies relation semantics and manages the relation consistency. The proposed relational model offers a high-level language to express relations between objects. Our originality is to gather all the semantic information relative to a given relation in a unique entity and to introduce the activation point notion for consistency incremental management. The effective relation integration in an object-oriented language remains consistent with data encapsulation, uniformity and extensibility of such languages. Due to our model, we have implemented a consistent graphical interface and introduced several inheritance links in our language. The link concept issued from this approach appears to be very powerful to express formally dependency links and more precisely inheritance links.