A smooth migration path towards a fully object-oriented PCTE

Since object-oriented approaches have shown more and more advantages in supporting software development, we propose an object-oriented extension of PCTE. By that the current PCTE OMS, which belongs to the class of structurally object-oriented database systems, and thus shows weaknesses concerning both data integration and control integration, is enhanced to become a fully object-oriented PCTE OMS. Our proposal differs substantially from some other research work in that we make an extension to the PCTE OMS data model, which can be either realized as a layer on top of PCTE or included into a future kernel of PCTE. We present solutions to the problems resulting from the special characteristics of PCTE. It is shown how the proposed extensions provide a smooth migration path to the technology of tomorrow.