Object oriented development - Essay Example

It is an easier way to keep track of program flow and much organized than the traditional "spaghetti codes" produced by unstructured programming methods. In 70's, a new programming technique began to gain popularity as a "top-down" approach to program design. This is a technique where a program designer maps out large-scale structure of a program and breaks them into smaller operations. These smaller operations will be tested or debug separately and connect them together into the entire program.

Structured programming facilitates easy understanding of smaller pieces of code without having to understand the whole program at once. By the end of the 20th century, mainstream programmers realized the significance and value of structured approach began to apply the concept in high-level programming languages. In the middle of the 1980's, another concept in program development made its way to become the dominant programming methodology. Mainly influenced by C++ and the popularity of GUI (Graphical User Interface), Object-oriented programming became the most sought after programming method to date.

The objective behind object-oriented programming is to view computer programs as a collection of individual units or objects that is capable of receiving messages, processing data, and sending messages to each other. This is different from the belief and practice that a program is just a compilation of functions and procedures or a list of commands for a computer to follow. Object-oriented programming is broadly accepted in large-scale software development. It is adaptable, easy to learn, simpler to develop and maintain, and easier to manage.

The fundamental concepts of OOP (short for object oriented programming) are class, object, encapsulation, inheritance, abstraction, and polymorphism. Class is a unit of data and function for a particular thing. For instance, a "class of students" might be a set, which include different type of students (male, female, black, white etc.). An Object is an occurrence of a class, a run-time demonstration of a specific pattern of a class. For instance, the gender "male" and "female" as a subclass and "Alfred" the student as an object in the class of students.

Encapsulation is a type of privacy to ensure that an object can be change only through established channels within a class. It simply means packaging the data and related functions into one unified unit, a class. Inheritance- is a mechanism for creating subclasses; it provides a way to define a subclass or an extension of a universal class. For instance, as students, class is a subclass of year level class and gender of student in a class is a subclass of the class students. An Abstraction is the ability of a program to disregard the details of an object's class or subclass and simplify it into a more suitable general level.

For instance, "Alfred" the students may be abstracted to a more generic level as year level super class. Polymorphism is a varying behaviour depending on the class in which the behaviour is call upon to act. This is to say that two or more classes can answer independently and in an entirely different way to an identical message. THE EVOLUTION OF OBJECT-ORIENTED PHPNot too many people know that PHP, the popular and powerful web base scripting language, coined in the summer