Shark shark = new Shark();
 Collection<Fish> swarm = new ArrayList();
 for ( ... ) swarm.add(new Fish());
 ...
 swarm.mimicryAttack(shark);

Swarm Behavior is a new composition operator that associates behavior with a collection of instances. The lookup of swarm behavior is based on the element type of a collection and is thus orthogonal to the collection hierarchy.

The method mimicryAttack …

• is defined in the lexical scope of the Fish class,
• is available for all subtypes of Collection, but
• limited to collections that contain Fish instances.
• can be overridden by subclasses of the Fish class.

NB, useful for both static and dynamic languages.

Publications

• Adrian Kuhn, David Erni, Marcus Denker, "Empowering Collections with Swarm Behavior," to be submitted to somewhere sometimes, (mail us to get a copy).

• David Erni, "JAG – a Prototype for Collective Behavior in Java," Technical Report, University of Bern, August 2008, Bachelor’s thesis.
• Adrian Kuhn, "Collective Behavior," Proceedings of 3rd ECOOP Workshop on Dynamic Languages and Applications (DYLA 2007), August 2007.

Downloads

• For Ruby, see Swarm Behavior in Ruby, just a quick hack...
• For Smalltalk, http://www.squeaksource.com/CollectiveBehavior.html
• For Java, @erni/dist/jag.zip (tutorial see appendix of David’s thesis)

People

• Adrian Kuhn
• David Erni