Who should attend: Programmers with an understanding of object-oriented programming. Although this course defines "class," "method," "inheritance," etc., this is an advanced course and you should know the basics.

What you will learn: How metaclasses can be used to improve productivity and reusability in object-oriented programming.

The course starts from first principles to construct an object model that is class-based (every object has a class) with first-class classes (every class is an object).

After the object model is established, we will introduce a metaobject protocol for manipulating the model. The metaobject protocol supports a new dimension for inheritance: inheritance of metaclass constraints. Based on this, we will describe facilities required for composable metaclasses, that is, how a metaclass imparts to its instances the composite properties of its ancestors.

We will conclude by demonstrating a number of useful metaclasses that do compose with each other.

Note: This is not a SOM course. The metaobject protocol for this course is not the IBM SOM Metaobject Protocol and the material goes beyond IBM SOM.

Ira R. Forman As a member of IBM's Object Technology Products Group, in Austin, which produced the SOMobjects Toolkit, Dr. Forman worked on the SOM Metaclass Framework. He has been working in object-oriented programming since 1984. He received his PhD from the University of Maryland where he studied under Harlan Mills. Forman's specialties are object-oriented distributed systems and object composition.

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