Object Oriented Programming

Maad M. Mijwel
February 2015

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming language model

that targets objects rather than logic, rather than actions. Historically, a
program has long been considered a purely logical procedure that accepts input
data, processes it, and generates output data.
The challenge of programming has long been seen in how to write the
logic rather than how the data is defined. Object-oriented programmers, on the
other hand, consider that the objects we manipulate are more important than
the logic required to manipulate the data. Examples of objects range from
people (described by name, address and so on) to buildings and floors (whose
properties are described and managed) to small widgets on a desktop PC (such
as buttons and scrollbars).
The first step in the OOP is to determine all the objects that the
programmer wants to work on, and all the relationships between the objects-
an exercise often referred to as data modeling . Each object in the system can
be thought of as an abstract model of an actor, who can do jobs, report and
change his state, and communicate with the other objects in the system, without
revealing how those capabilities are implemented.
Once an object has been identified, it is generalized to a class of objects
(think of Plato's concept of the "ideal" chair that stands for all chairs). The
object class defines the type of data it contains and any logic sequences that it
  
can manipulate. Every single logic sequence is called a method. Objects
communicate with well-defined interfaces called messages.
The concepts and rules used in object-oriented programming offer the
following benefits:
 The concept of the data class makes it possible to define subclasses of data
objects that share some or all of the features of the main class. This property
of OOP is called inheritance, forcing more thorough data analysis, shortens
development time, and provides more accurate coding.
 Because a class defines only the data it needs when executing an instance of

the class (an object), the code cannot accidentally access other program
data. This property of hiding data provides higher system security and
avoids unintentional data corruption.
 The definition of a class is not only reusable in the program for which it was

originally created. Rather, it can also be used by other object-oriented

programs (and can therefore be more easily distributed for use in networks).
 The concept of data classes allows a programmer to generate any new data

type that is not already defined in the language itself.

The first object-oriented programming language was Simula . Today,
Java, Python , C ++, Visual Basic .NET, and Ruby are the most popular OOP
languages. The Java programming language is designed specifically for use in
distributed enterprise network and Internet applications. Ruby is used in many
web applications. Curl, Smalltalk, Delphi, and Eiffel are other examples of
object-oriented programming languages.