1.10. Object Technology: A Quick Refresher

Building software quickly, correctly and economically remains an elusive goal at a time when demands for new and more powerful software are soaring. Objects, or more precisely—as we’ll see in Chapter 3—the classes objects come from, are essentially reusable software components. There are date objects, time objects, audio objects, video objects, automobile objects, people objects, etc. Almost any noun can be reasonably represented as a software object in terms of attributes (e.g., name, color and size) and behaviors (e.g., calculating, moving and communicating). Software developers are discovering that using a modular, object-oriented design and implementation approach can make software development groups much more productive than was possible with earlier popular techniques like “structured programming”—object-oriented programs are often easier to understand, correct and modify.

The Automobile as an Object

To help you understand objects and their contents, let’s begin with a simple analogy. Suppose you want to drive a car and make it go faster by pressing its accelerator pedal. What must happen before you can do this? Well, before you can drive a car, someone has to design it. A car typically begins as engineering drawings, similar to the blueprints that describe the design of a house. These drawings include the design for an accelerator pedal. The pedal hides from the driver the complex mechanisms that actually make the car go faster, just as the brake pedal hides the mechanisms that slow the car, and the steering wheel “hides” the mechanisms that turn the car. This enables people with little or no knowledge of how engines, braking and steering mechanisms work to drive a car easily.