Object-Oriented System Engineering - Report Example

Download file to see previous pages The resources (both manpower as well as a system) involved in such transitions are much higher compared to developing a middleware application. However, the advantages of using an object-oriented paradigm overwhelm these drawbacks with its enormous optimistic features and functionalities. The amount of effort involved in system transitions though high is only a one-time process. Once the existing models are transformed into object-oriented models, the maintenance of the system becomes much easier and the resources involved for further enhancements would be reduced to a very great extent. Thus the end product of the above process using Object Oriented approach would be the most reliable software application which runs on low production/maintenance cost.

As compared to procedural or structured programming in which we define a solution to a problem as a set of procedures or actions that can be performed in order to accomplish the task, the object-orientated approach solves a problem by considering each entity involved in the problem as real-world objects. For example, in a banking system, some of the entities involved are customers, accounts, loans, etc. A customer can have one or more accounts and may borrow one or more loans. In the object-oriented approach, each of these entities is treated as objects as shown in the below figure (fig 1). The objects communicate with each other by sending and receiving messages to perform the required task.

The structure of the entity in terms of all the functions (methods) and the data (inputs and outputs) involved for an object are defined in separate modules called Class. For example, in the above diagram, the data involved for the customer object would be customer id, customer name, customer address, customer contact number, customer email, etc. The functions involved would be to add customer data, get customer data, update customer data, etc. The bundle of all these data in the form of variables/data fields and all these functions in terms of methods are defined as a template/structure in a module (a piece of code stored separately) called Class (name it CUSTOMER). ...Download file to see next pages Read More