Talents

Reuse in object-oriented languages typically focuses on inheritance. Numerous techniques have been developed to provide finer-grained reuse of methods, such as flavors, mixins and traits. These techniques, however, only deal with reuse at the level of classes. Class-based reuse is inherently static. Increasing use of reflection and meta-programming techniques in real world applications underline the need for more dynamic approaches. We propose a new approach that deals with reuse at the object level and that supports behavioral composition. We introduce a new abstraction called a talent which models features that are shared between objects of different class hierarchies. Talents provide a composition mechanism that is as flexible as that of traits but which is dynamic.

Presentations

Getting Started

To get started you can either use a ready-made one-click image (suggested), or try to load the code yourself.

One-Click Image

Loading

Gofer new 
    squeaksource: 'talents';
    package: 'ConfigurationOfTalents';
    load.
(Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfTalents)
    perform: #loadDefault.

Publications

Papers