Advantages of Object Oriented Approach

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that uses "objects" and their interactions to design applications and computer programs.

Object Oriented Development (OOD) has been touted as the next great advance in software engineering. It promises to reduce development time, reduce the time and resources required to maintain existing applications, increase code reuse, and provide a competitive advantage to organizations that use it.

The key ideas of the object oriented approach are :

• Encapsulation
• Objects
• Class and Inheritance
• Instances and Instantiation
• Methods and Messages

Some important features of Object Oriented programming are as follows:

• Emphasis on data rather than procedure
• Objects can communicate with each other through functions
• Programs are divided into Objects
• New data and functions can be easily added whenever necessary
• Data is hidden and cannot be accessed by external functions
• Follows bottom-up approach

Advantages of Object Oriented Development (OOD)

Simplicity: software objects model real world objects, so the complexity is reduced and the program structure is very clear.

Reusability: Reusability is a desired goal of all development and is based on the reluctance of reinventing something when it has already been invented. Objects contain both data and functions that act on data, objects can be thought of as self-contained "boxes" (encapsulation). This feature makes it easy to reuse code in new systems. Messages provide a predefined interface to an object's data and functionality. If you know this interface, you can make use on an object in any context you want. OOP languages, such as C# , make it easy to expand on the functionality of these "boxes", even if you don't know much about their implementation.

Increased Quality: Increases in quality are largely a by-product of this program reuse. If 90% of a new application consists of proven, existing components, then only the remaining 10% of the code has to be tested from scratch. That observation implies an order-of-magnitude reduction in defects.

Faster Development: OOD (Object oriented development) leads to faster development. Many of the claims of potentially reduced development time are correct in principle.

Maintainable: OOP methods make code more maintainable. Objects can be maintained separately, making locating and fixing problems easier. The principles of good OOP design contribute to an application's maintainability.

Scalable: Object oriented applications are more scalable then structured approach. As an object's interface provides for reusing the object in new software, it also provides all the information needed to replace the object without affecting other code. This makes it easy to replace old and aging code with faster algorithms and newer technology.

Modularity: Object-oriented systems have a natural structure for modular design: objects, subsystems, framework, and so on. Thus, OOD systems are easier to modify. OOD systems can be altered in fundamental ways without ever breaking up since changes are neatly encapsulated.

Modifiability: It is easy to make minor changes in the data representation or the procedures in an OO program. For example, the year 2000 (Y2K) problem may have been eliminated by identifying a date object within a system and accessing this object when you needed to date an operation. If the date object had the state variables of month, day and year with each defined as two-character variables, the only change that would be necessary to correct the Y2K problem was to change the year state variable of only the date object.

Client/Server Architecture: Client/server applications involve transmission of messages back and forth over a network, and the object-message paradigm of OOD meshes well with the physical and conceptual architecture of client/server applications.

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