0.1 What is oop and why should i care?  (Page 2/7)

Supplemental material

I recommend that you also study the other lessons in my extensive collection of online programming tutorials. You will find a consolidated index at www.DickBaldwin.com .

What is object-oriented programming (OOP)?

If you Google this question, you will get hundreds of answers. Here is my answer along with an anecdotal description.

Unlike earlier programming styles,

Object-oriented programming is a programming style that mimics the way most people think and work .

An anecdotal description

If you have ever assembled a child's playscape in your back yard, this scenario should soundfamiliar to you.

When you opened the large boxes containing the playscape, hundreds of objects spilled onto the ground. Those objects may have consisted of braces,chains, swing seats, slides, screws, nuts, bolts, washers, climbing ropes, ladder rungs, and other assorted objects.

Atomic and non-atomic objects

I will refer to the kind of object that I have described in the above list as atomic objects. What I mean by that is that they can't be easilysubdivided into smaller objects.

If you were lucky, some of the objects in the box may not have been atomic objects. Instead they may have been pre-assembled arrangements of atomicobjects such as a climbing net composed of individual ropes tied together to form a net.

Your job - assemble the objects

Your job was to assemble those hundreds of atomic and non-atomic objects into a final object which you proudly referred to as "The Playscape."

Objects working together

It has been said that a successful object-oriented program consists of a bunch of cooperating software objects working together to achieve a specifiedbehavior. The overall behavior of the program is the combination of behaviors of the individual objects. For example, some objects may acquireinput data, other objects may compute and produce output data, while other objects may display the output data.

It could also be said that a playscape consists of a bunch of hardware objects working together to achieve a specified behavior. The overallbehavior of the playscape is the combination of behaviors of the individual objects. For example, the behavior of some of the braces is to standstrong and not bend or break, while the behavior of a swing is to be flexible and move in a prescribed way.

Creating a model

One of the tasks of an object-oriented programmer is to assemble software objects into a model that often represents something that exists in the realworld. For a very visual example, you might be asked to create an advertising web page showing an animated software model of the playscape thatyou assembled in your back yard. With the playscape, you were simply required to assemble the existing hardware objects. However, in the object-orientedprogramming world, you must do more than just assemble objects.

Objects must be designed and manufactured

Getting back to the playscape, every one of the objects for the playscape was manufactured before being shipped to you. Even before that, each objectwas designed by someone and a set of manufacturing drawings was probably created so that the object could be mass produced in a high-volume manufacturing facility.