14.1. Object-Oriented Development

An object-oriented approach to software development shifts the focus from building computing procedures that operate on sets of data to modeling business processes. Building software components that model business processes with documented interfaces makes programming more efficient and allows applications to offer more flexible deployment strategies. It also makes applications easier to modify when business conditions change. In addition, since the modeling reflects real business use, application performance may improve as objects are built that do not require excessive manipulation to conform to the real-world behavior of the business processes they represent.

Oracle chose to take an evolutionary approach to object technology by allowing data abstraction, or the creation of user-defined datatypes as objects and collections as extensions to the Oracle relational database. The Objects and Extensibility features, included with the database since Oracle8i, position Oracle as an object-relational database.