Enabling View-based Programming with SCROLL

Present-day software systems have to fulfill an increasing number of requirements rendering them more and more complex. Many systems need to anticipate changing contexts (self-adaptive systems) or need to adapt to changing business rules or requirements (self-optimizing systems). The challenge of 21th century software development will be to cope with these aspects. We believe that the role concept offers a simple way to adapt object-oriented programs to their changing contexts. In a role-based language, an object plays multiple roles during its lifetime. If the contexts are represented as first-class entities, they provide dynamic views to the object-oriented program, and if the context changes, the dynamic views can be switched easily, and the software system adapts automatically.