1.3. Object Technology

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 have discovered that using a modular, object-oriented design-and-implementation approach can make software-development groups much more productive than was possible with earlier techniques—object-oriented programs are often easier to understand, correct and modify.