OROS: toward a type model for software development environments

Abstract

Three important goals of next generation software development environments (SDEs) are extensibility, integration and broad scope. Our work on OROS is predicated on the hypothesis that a type model, incorporated into an environment's object manager, can contribute to achieving those goals. This paper reports on an attempt at applying object-oriented typing concepts in the domain of software development environments. We believe that the result is a type model that has properties of interest both to software environment builders and also to builders and users of object-oriented systems in general.