The difference between encapsulation and abstraction seems to trouble some people, which is something I find rather odd. While both are concepts important to object oriented design, and while both are complementary to one another, they are two different concepts. In this article I will explain briefly what encapsulation and abstraction are, and how they Read more…
In this article I want to look at the essential characteristics that objects have, namely those of state, behaviour and identity. This article follows on from my my What is an Object? article of a while ago, when I offered the following definition of what an object is: An object is a physical manifestation of Read more…
Much present day commercial software development – probably the majority of it – claims to be object oriented, and at the centre of object oriented software is the object. So, what is an object? Unfortunately, the word object seems to have joined the ranks of the buzzwords. It seems to have become one of those Read more…
This article is a follow-up to my previous article Accessing Object Properties While Respecting Encapsulation. In that article I looked at making object properties accessible while respecting encapsulation. In this article I will look at how to design operations on objects in order to update property values while respecting encapsulation – that is, without resorting Read more…
Despite object oriented programming having been mainstream for well over a decade now, there are still concepts associated with it that are sources of confusion for its practitioners. It seems to me that, unfortunately, easily available guidance is still in short supply. One source of problems is this: how should an object should make information Read more…