Linking Object-Oriented Conceptual Modeling with Object-Oriented Implementation in Java Oscar Pastor, Emilio Insfrán, Vicente Pelechano, Susana Ramírez Departament de Sistemes Informàtics i Computació Universitat Politècnica de València Camí de Vera s/n 46071 Valencia (Spain) {opastoreinsfranpele}@dsic.upv.es Abstract Nowadays, if we want to obtain a sound and correct final software product it is very important to be able to properly join modern OO programming environments, which are built for the new Internet architectures, with the OO methodologies produced over the last few years in order to deal properly with the Conceptual Modeling process. Our contribution to this objective is the OO-Method [Pas96] proposal. OO- Method is an OO Methodology that allows analysts to introduce the relevant system information by means of a set of graphical models to obtain the conceptual model through a requirement collection phase, so that an OO formal specification in OASIS [Pas95] can be generated at any given moment. This formal specification acts as a high-level system repository. Furthermore, a Java software prototype, which is functionally equivalent to the OASIS specification, is also generated in an automated way. This is achieved by defining an execution model that gives the pattern to obtain a concrete implementation in the selected target software development environment. A CASE workbench [Pas97] supports the methodology. 1. Introduction Software technology has undergone, over the last few years, considerable transformation. One of the main reasons for this transformation is the emergence of the object-oriented (OO) model as a software production paradigm that covers all the traditional analysis, design and implementation steps. We have OO methodologies [Boo94, Col94, Jac92, Rum95], OO databases, OO programming languages, etc. However, we consider that there is still not a clear understanding of what an object is. Or, better explained, everyone understands perfectly what his/her objects are. The problems come from the fact that often objects in conceptual modeling are not the same as in programming or database environments. Consequently, ambiguities appear everywhere. The OO approach is still a loosely defined term, even if some salient