An object relationship framework and persistence in Java

The main objective of this thesis is to provide the design and implementation of an object relationship framework in Java where objects can form relationships with other objects dynamically at runtime. Relationships among objects have long been recognized as the important semantic constructs facilitating ease of analysis & design of large complex systems. Almost all modeling techniques have notations to describe the existence of relationships among software components. But unfortunately the relationships identified in analysis stage could not be mapped to the equivalent high-level language constructs during the implementation because of lack of high level semantic support for relationships in the existing object-oriented languages.Relationships are considered an important part of the total object structure and semantically belong to more than one object. This brings the need to make relationships persistent along with the objects that participate in. Several approaches to persistence have been discussed and the choice of one over the other is rationalized with regard to object-oriented methodology.