Polymorphism, Persistence and Software Reuse in a Strongly Typed Object Oriented Environment

The major requirements of a system for software reuse are that it must provide an abstraction mechanism for adequately describing the components; a mechanism for naming and storing the components; and a mechanism for composing new objects out of existing components.
In this paper we describe a polymorphic type system that may be used to describe generic components and a persistence mechanism that may be used to name, store and compose components. By integrating the two, we obtain a strongly typed persistent environment that is an ideal base as a system for software reuse.