Patent ID: 6427229
Filing Date: 2002-07-30
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
An apparatus comprising:at least one processor; a memory coupled to the at least one processor; an object oriented object mechanism residing in the memory and executed by the at least one processor, the object mechanism including: a container class that contains a collection of elements; a maintainer class that defines a maintenance interface to maintain elements on the collection, the maintainer class using the interface of the container class to maintain the collection; a key class that defines at least one key object for the collection, each key object having a corresponding unique identifier and being assigned to one of the elements in the collection, the key class defining at least one object method for converting the unique identifier to a corresponding character string; and a policy class that specifies at least one constraint on the maintenance of the elements in the collection; wherein an instance of the maintainer class is invoked to create a new object in the collection according to a specified key object, and in response, the instance of the maintainer class creates the new object, invokes the at least one object method on a the specified key object to convert the unique identifier for the specified key object to a corresponding character string, and stores the new object in the collection using the character string as a key.