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Migrating from Legacy Programming Practices |
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Before you venture knee-deep into solid, experienced-based object-oriented programming in Visual Basic, you need a primer on OOP. Object-oriented programming is a complex technology. Programmers new to object technology should view OOP as an important, new computer programming paradigm. That is, decisions about application design are made before programming (or construction) even begins. Ad hoc assumptions about an application's design during construction are no longer valid. In fact, if such assumptions do occur, this indicates that the application's architecture has not been properly planned using object technology. Object technology requires much more organized work up front in problem assessment, analysis, and design for relatively complex problems. After reading this book, you'll know why it is important to plan your object-oriented application before you begin programming. |
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Object-oriented programming is the process of developing one-to-many lines of programming instructions, based on well-defined design models. Such design models are graphical illustrations that represent different aspects of objects, those objects' classes (from which they derive functions and property variables), and their interactions with each other. |
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New Term: A design model is a graphical illustration that represents different aspects of objects, their parents, and their interactions with each other. Through inheritance, child classes derive their functions and properties from parent classes that can be modeled in a design model artifact known as a class diagram. |
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With all the hoopla surrounding the emergence and increasing acceptance of object-oriented programming, you might be saying to yourself, Oh, boy! Every week there seems to be some new technology pronouncing itself the guardian of true object orientation: Java/CORBA, C++/Visual Basic/ActiveX/MFC, and so on. That's the dynamic nature of new discoveries in the object technology community. Object technology companies are scrambling to find better and easier ways for designers and programmers of all backgrounds to migrate to the object-oriented paradigm. |
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Databases are becoming more object-oriented, and even the Internet is moving away from the common gateway interface (CGI) services to more robust distributed object architectures. The seasoned object-oriented practitioner merely folds useful technologies into his or her mind with a minimal learning curve. For those unaccustomed to object technology, though, whose skills might still depend on more traditional development technologies, the steady rise of object-oriented programming is a frightening, unfamiliar menace to the status quo. What does all this mean? you might ask. |
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