Improving object oriented software development with a rule-based tool

This paper presents a database language which may be considered as a tool, in a software development process, for checking consistency or controlling integrity constraints. The main features of our proposition lies on the declarativeness of the language which is based on logical rules and integrates object oriented concepts. The language takes advantage of the object oriented approach since object concepts facilitate the representation of the different required meta-levels. The syntax and semantics of our rules take into account the fundamental concepts of this approach like object, identifier, class, attribute, type, method, inheritance. We introduce the concept of logical collection. We give a formal description of the language, and present an example of application in the software environment