The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Aug. 17, 1999
Filed:
May. 31, 1996
I-Shin Andy Wang, San Jose, CA (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
The present invention discloses a method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for providing object tracking capabilities in object-oriented programming environments using a tracker class and associated functions, and a memory for storing tracker objects. The tracker class, once defined as a base class of any target class that needs the tracking capability, automatically tracks all the objects instantiated from the target class in a linked list. Objects instantiated from classes derived from the tracker class are automatically tracked when the target objects are initialized, be it on a heap or on a stack, because the constructor of the tracker class is invoked by the constructor of the target class. The tracker class is defined as a template, so that it can be applied to any type of target object.