Frameworks and Object-Oriented Programming

Object-oriented programming is one of the technologies that have been proposed and adopted to make the process of creating software easier, faster, and more efficient. This chapter presents some of the high points of object-oriented programming from a language-neutral point of view and notes some of the issues that come into play with the use of object-oriented tools. Mac OS X is thoroughly object oriented and allows the user to use its framework with several languages. Object-oriented programming is at the heart of Mac OS X. Cocoa is an object-oriented framework. MacApp—Apple's C++ framework—is a comfortable fixture in the Carbon environment, which is a set of libraries that constitute a framework in the Mac OS X. Cocoa offers the developer a choice of two object-oriented languages: Objective-C and Java. Despite a steep learning curve, object-oriented programming is easier than traditional procedural programming. From a practical point of view, in the world of object-oriented programming, an object can be left untouched once it has been developed. Its functionality and interfaces can be frozen, and it can be used without worrying about its internals. Procedural languages even with shared libraries and utility routines rarely can provide this degree of isolation.