Talents: an environment for dynamically composing units of reuse

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 underlines the need for more dynamic approaches. New approaches have shifted to object-specific reuse. However, these techniques fail to provide a complete solution to the composition issues arising during reuse. We propose a new approach that deals with reuse at the object level and that supports behavioral and state 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.