The Amulet Prototype-Instance Framework

Amulet is a new kind of object-oriented framework for user interface development that is based on a prototype-instance object system instead of the conventional class-instance object system. In a prototype-instance object system, there is no concept of a “class” since every object can serve as a prototype for other objects, and any instance can override any methods or data values. Amulet is also differentiated by high-level encapsulations of interactive behaviors, and by the ubiquitous use of constraints, which are relationships that the programmer declares once and then are enforced by the system. The result is that programs written using the Amulet framework have a different style than those written with conventional frameworks. For instance, Amulet applications are typically constructed by combining instances of the built-in objects, rather than by subclassing the built-in classes or writing methods. Amulet is written in C++ and is portable across Windows NT and 95, Unix X/11, and the Macintosh.