Configuration-oriented programming

Abstract

Development cycle of information systems, especially maintenance and modifications, is still time- consuming and expensive. This paper presents a new programming paradigm, the Configuration-oriented programming (COP), which introduces a new dimension - configuration - into the Object-oriented programming paradigm (OOP). This new dimension introduces a new point of view at a configuration through a configuration form that enables the use of inheritance, abstraction, polymorphism, and recursive definition on the configuration. Based on several years of experience in using this new paradigm in real live projects we observed that this new dimension enables a more effective development of complex information systems by associating modules (similar to objects in the OOP) into complex structures (by defining associations among the modules using configuration).