Chapter 7. The Association Relationship

Introduction to Association

As is typical within the object-oriented community, one needs to be careful with vocabulary. The same term can imply different things to different developers. In the behavioral-driven methodologies, such as those proposed by Wirfs-Brock et al., Booch, and Jacobson [9,7,3,4], the general overview is that designers first find classes and their protocols. This implies that the first relationship application designers find is the uses relationship. During design they refine some of these uses relationships into containment relationships and then examine the domain for inheritance hierarchies. At the end of this process, it is possible to find some classes that are related but the relationship ...

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