You will often here in arguments about which language is superior and the phase "Object Orientated" (also known as OO) being used as an advantage or maybe even a disadvantage, but what is OO? how does it help? and how is it supported in Jamagic?

OO is simply a method of writing your programs. As programs get bigger and more complex then the time and resources required to debug them grows at an alarming rate. This was causing more and more cash and man-hours for the software industry and lead to delay and buggy software for the users.

Languages such as C and most based on 'Basic' use a design method called procedural program design. This type of programming of course works fine, but as the programs became more complex code maintenance costs have the potential to increase. Problems such as use of the same variable names, especially in multi-person development, lack of re-useable code between products and similar code being used in different places through a project (which then if a problem was found had to be fixed in multiple places) was causing software development time and cost to spiral out of control.

OO programming attempts to solve these issues, programs would be broken down into simple "objects". Each object or group of objects (in general) is independent of the others. It has its own variables and code, which do not interfere with any other objects even if they use the same variable names.

Secondly OO was designed as to attempt to separate the use of these objects (what it does) from its implementation (how it does it) similar to the idea of CSS within web site design for people more familiar with that. For example in the case of a object "human" the object might have the ability to "sleep", "eat" and "move". Somebody who wants to use the "human" object should not have to know anything about how these abilities (called instance methods in most OO programming circles) actually work. The user only needs to know what methods the "human" object has and what parameters if any they require. Separating the implementation from the design and hiding the implementation from the user is often called encapsulation.

Because these objects are self-consistent then it becomes possible to use them across multiple projects and as mentioned above by different people whom have no idea how it actually works! All that is required is for the user to be supplied with adequate documentation.

Ok enough of the theory that I'll probably get lots of emails about being incorrect anyway lets see what it means for Jamagic users. Jamagic supports some, but not all of the idea's of OO programming.

This is part one of a two part article. In this part we will get to gribs with the basics and terminology often used in OO programming in Jamagic. Part two will expand on these idea's and show more applied usage of them within Jamagic.



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