RE: Picking the Tools -- Marrying processing models to data model s

[Al Snell <alaric@alaric-snell.com>]

On Tue, 22 May 2001, Michael Brennan wrote:

> paradigms. More importantly, a well-architected OO system is typically far
> more maintainable, and easier to adapt to changing requirements, than a
> non-OO system.

Aye. The fact that you can replace any part of the system by another part
implementing the same interface without having to delve into the original
source helps.

An example of how an OO data model is important, I find, is creating
proxies. Say you have your customer database full of customer objects,
actually being an OO interface to an RDBMS or a full OODBMS or
whatever. Then say that your company merges with another that uses a
different model. You can write a new class implementing or
inheriting "Customer" (depending on your language) that actually talks to
the other database, and start instantiating customers from that database
as well as yours and feeding them into the customer-processing code. If
the customer-processing code assumed that the customers were XML in a
filesystem, you'd have to do a lot of recoding or emulate a filesystem to
do that...

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software