Object Oriented Systems

There are few changes to modern computer systems design and architecture that have had such a profound influence as the ineluctable rush toward object oriented design (OOD) and object oriented programming (OOP).

In software design and systems analysis, the object represents a principal component of the design and the program. Each object is a self-contained and integral part of the computer systems, responsible for its own data, its own activities, and the integrity of its actions. Objects not only define the their own data but they define the operations that are allowed on that data. The data and operations (called Methods) can be both public as well as private. Publishing public methods for an object shields the user from the actual internals of the data structure and algorithms. Objects can belong to families or trees of similar objects – that is, they can inherit attributes (data and methods) from parent objects.

As an example, in a marketing or retailing system, an object might be a CUSTOMER. A CUSTOMER object  (like an EMPLOYEE) is a type of PERSON object (and inherits the attributes of a person). shows, we can visualize the object as a container holding both private and public parts. The CUSTOMER object contains all the information about a particular customer (called an instance of the object). This information, the data fields or variables, may or may not be visible to the users of the object. The object also as associated with it, the procedures necessary to perform all allowable operations on a CUSTOMER (such as adding and deleting customers, updating the data variables, associated a collection of purchases with this customer, displaying a customer’s profile, or fetching a customer from the organization’s central database.) And, as we can see, the data variables in an object can, themselves, be other objects. The object model thus provides a unified, uniform, and well-behaved paradigm for the representation, implementation, and use of complex software projects.

Object design plays a crucial role in machine intelligence as well as the design and integration of intelligent components into a client’s application framework. The Scianta Adaptive Intelligent Platform is a rich, Java J2EE and C++ object oriented environment encapsulating a wide spectrum of advanced machine intelligence, networking, and computer science capabilities. The Intelligence Platform also supports a set of extended Scianta Design Patterns specifically oriented toward intelligent object systems (such as the Discover, Noise Filter, and Elasticity patterns).