Introducing Object Oriented Concept

In this section you will learn about ‘How to think in Object Oriented way’.

Objectives

After completing this unit you should be able to:
* Think the real world in object oriented way
* Understand what really object and class means
* Describe what are attributes and responsibilities of an object.

Topics

In this unit, you will learn about the following topics:
* What’s wrong with starting of Object Oriented Programming
* Philosophy of OOP
* Mapping Object Oriented Thoughts to Object Oriented Programming

What’s wrong with starting of Object Oriented Programming
Unfortunately most of the people start Object Oriented Programming (OOP) jumping into a language book like C++, Java or C# etc. But it’s not a good start at all. Staring with OOP language book, you may learn writing package/namespace, class, object, interface, etc. But writing class, interface, object etc. does not guarantee good software design. OOP is totally useless if you can’t use this concept for good software design. So, what should to know first? What should you know before starting with an OOP book?

First of all you should know: what’s an object and how to think in OO (Object Oriented) way.

Philosophy of OOP
Yes, Starting of Object Oriented Programming is of course the concept of object.
And this concept is really simple. Ok, I am starting to speak about it. Before starting, I am requesting you to forget everything about programming, database design, software design i.e. all kinds of software engineering and programming language details for some couple of minutes (not forever!!).

Everything can be an object
Look around you, what you see ALL ARE OBJECTS. You may see computer, chair, table, pen, air cooler, carpet etc, all these are objects. Why they are object? Pretty simple, they have some related attributes and some related activities. How? Ok, just think about computer, it has processor, RAM, hard drive, keyboard, mouse, etc. all these things are the attributes of computer. Now, what’re the activities of a computer? It has a lot: it runs antivirus program, displays information, accepts your requests and executes these properly. All these are the activities of computer. So, computer is an object. Same way you will get the attributes and activities of chair, table, etc. So, to be an object, something should have attributes and/or should have activities. Finally, from the above discussion, we can draw a conclusion:

Everything can be an object.

How it is possible? Is it possible that any event, like war or raining, singing, thinking etc (which is not visible) can be object? The answer is YES. These can be objects also. Think, raining has attributes: is it drizzling or “cats and dogs”? Singing can be an object if you consider, in which frequency-range it is sung?

‘Name’ – is it an attribute or an object? Its totally depends on problem domain. See, if you thinking about a banking solution then customer ‘Name’ will be an attribute of customer. But if it a business from where you can purchase the ‘Name’ of your new-born baby then ‘Name’ will be an object to this business. Because ‘Name’ has meaning, length, etc.

Note: In some OOP books, authors may use data instead attribute and responsibility (I personally think its better term) instead of activity.

Object’s data and responsibility depend on problem domain
If I tell you and your friend to find out the data and activity of customer object, suppose, you get customer with name, email, phone attributes and purchase, bargain activities. At the same time your friend may get customer with first name, middle name, last name, gender, credit card attributes and open account activity.

Why it happens? It happens because you and your friend were on different platform with different point of view. You think about the customer of a grocery store whereas your friend thinks about the customer of a bank. But you both are right. Nothing goes wrong with it.

So, object and its data, its responsibility totally depends on problem domain.

What is class?
Class is the blue print of object. Suppose, I say Johnny, Mary and Russell are students. Here, Johnny, Mary and Russell are objects and Student is the class. More specifically, Student is the class with name attributes and there are three student objects whose names are Johnny, Mary and Russell.

Walkthrough 1: Mapping Object Oriented Thoughts to Object Oriented Programming

To make our conception more clear, now we will try to make a small application. Of course, we will try it Object Oriented way.

Let’s start. Suppose our considering problem domain as follows:
“………User wants to get full name and reverse full name providing first name, middle name and last name of a person.”

We will identify the objects first. Here, we will get ‘Person’ object as follows:
Person
Has first name
Has middle name
Has last name

Can tell its full name
Can tell its reverse name

Now we will implement this in C# (VS 2008, DotNet 3.5), an OOP language.

Steps:
1. Start Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
2. Click File>New>Project

You will see the following window. Select ‘Class Library’ template, give a meaningful name and select your preferable location.

3. Click ‘Ok’ Button
4. In Solution Explorer, you will see Class1.cs file. Delete this file.
5. Select project (not solution) OOPWalkThrough1 and Click right button. Then Click on Add>Class from the popup menu. You will get following window.

6. Remind we have found an object, ‘Person’ in our problem domain. Here we will give ‘Person.cs’ in Name as a file name.
7. Click ‘Add’ button and you will see the following code

using System;

namespace OOPWalkThrough1

{

    class Person

    {

    }

}

Here, Person is a class.

8. Now update the Person class as follows:

namespace OOPWalkThrough1

{

         class Person

         {

            public string firstName;

            public string middleName;

            public string lastName;

            public string GetMyFullName()

            {

               return firstName + " " + middleName + " " + lastName;

            }

            public string GetMyReverseName()

            {

               string reverseName = "";

               string fullName = GetMyFullName();

               for (int index = fullName.Length - 1; index >= 0; index--)

               {

                  reverseName += fullName[index];

               }

               return reverseName;

            }

         }

     }


Have a look inside the Person class. Compare the identified object (Person) with the Person class.

You see data of Person are represented by attributes and responsibilities are represented by methods. So any object creates from Person class will represent our domain object, Person.

9. Now add another class in this project. Here file name will be EntryPoint.cs (or any meaningful name you like) and write Main() method inside this class as follows:

namespace OOPWalkThrough1

{

    class EntryPoint

    {

        public static void Main()

        {

            Person personObj = new Person();

            personObj.firstName = Console.ReadLine();

            personObj.middleName = Console.ReadLine();

            personObj.lastName = Console.ReadLine();

            string fullName = personObj.GetMyFullName();

            string reverseName = personObj.GetMyReverseName();

            Console.WriteLine("Full Name: " + fullName);

            Console.WriteLine("Reverse Form: " + reverseName);

            Console.ReadLine();

        }

    }

}

Here, we will create a Person object, personObj from Person class using the following line:

                        Person personObj = new Person();

Then assign some data to the attributes of personObj as follows:

personObj.firstName = "James";

      personObj.middleName = "Lucas";

            personObj.lastName = "Scott";


Finally, ask personObj to tell it’s full name and reversed-name and get it:

            string fullName = personObj.GetMyFullName();

            string reverseName = personObj.GetMyReverseName();

10. To make the project executable, we need to change the project properties. Select the project, click right button, select Properties from pop-up menu; you will get the following tab to change project properties.

Select Output Type as Console Application and Startup object as OOPWalkThrough1.EntryPoint.

11. Run the application and you will the output:

12. To take input from user you need to change the Main() method. Replace these three lines:

personObj.firstName = "James";

      personObj.middleName = "Lucas";

            personObj.lastName = "Scott";

with the following three lines

            personObj.firstName = Console.ReadLine();

            personObj.middleName = Console.ReadLine();

         personObj.lastName = Console.ReadLine();

Important Note
Here, to keep the example simple, I’ve violated encapsulation (keep the data public) principle. Discussion has been started with a pretty simple use case and identification of domain object. Somebody may not agree with the process. But I think its better way to start Object Oriented Concept.