I-Java:

I-Java is an extension of Java with incomplete objects. This extension is based on the definition of specific annotations (thus the Java grammar is not extended). It provides a preprocessor that, given a program that uses our special annotations (for incomplete classes) and generates standard Java classes.

Incomplete Objects

The programmer, besides standard classes, can define incomplete classes whose instances are incomplete objects that can be composed in an object-based fashion. Hence, in our language it is possible:

1. to instantiate standard classes, obtaining fully-fledged objects ready to be used; 
2. to instantiate incomplete classes, obtaining incomplete objects that can be composed (by object composition) with complete objects, thus yielding new complete objects at run-time; 
3. in turn, to use a complete object obtained by composition for composing with other incomplete objects.

We refer to the research papers (see the box on the left) for the formal theory about incomplete objects.

Download

You can download the sources and binaries (released under GPL), from the SourceForge site.

Documentation

At the moment the documentation is quite small.
You just need to run the main class of the preprocessor specifying the path of the where the classes to be preproccessed are

    Main path

The preprocessor will generate the preprocessed classes into the subfolder "GeneratedClasses"; the classes in this folder must then be compiled with the standard Java compiler.

Involved People

• Lorenzo Bettini
• Viviana Bono
• Erica Turin