Empowering Collections with Swarm Behavior

TL;DR

This paper introduces Swarm Behavior, a novel composition operator for Java that enables associating behaviors with collections of objects, enhancing modeling of group-related properties and operations.

Contribution

It presents a new extension to Java that allows defining behaviors on collections, independent of collection hierarchy, facilitating better modeling of group properties.

Findings

Swarm Behavior enables behavior association with collections.

The lookup resolution is based on element type, not hierarchy.

The approach improves modeling of group-related properties.

Abstract

Often, when modelling a system there are properties and operations that are related to a group of objects rather than to a single object. In this paper we extend Java with Swarm Behavior, a new composition operator that associates behavior with a collection of instances. The lookup resolution of swarm behavior is based on the element type of a collection and is thus orthogonal to the collection hierarchy.