Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
> From: Jeff Lowery [mailto:jlowery@s...] > Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 11:36 AM > [...] > I've yet to see > a clearly articulated vision of what this post-OO (god, I > hope there's a > better name than that) world will look like. What would I, as > a developer, > stand to gain by refactoring <buzz> my objects into data model and > functional model? In most cases, I don't think you'd gain anything. I think that would be a step backward. If folks are seriously maintaining that XML makes OO obsolete, I would contend that that is absurd, and all evidence points to the contrary. If XML makes OO obsolete, then why do we have a DOM? Why do we have so many developers and vendors working on data-binding technologies? What about the "web services" buzz that is attracting growing developer mindshare, and which pushes XML down to an underlying "plumbing" layer masked by OO APIs? In the "web services" community, the "post-OO" world looks... well, very OO. The success of XML does point to one fact that more sensible developers have known all along: OO is not a panacea, and does not solve every problem. OO just happens to be the best paradigm for software development that anyone has come up with, so far. XML hasn't changed that. But OO does not address the situation very well in which information needs to be external to an application and shared with other applications (which may run on a different platform, use a different programming language, have different runtime libraries available, etc.). It also does not deal, very well, with more dynamic information models that are not very explicitly defined at development time. XML is very useful for these sorts of thing. OO is still very useful as a programming paradigm for dealing with XML, but when information needs to be shared, it is important to factor out that information model from the OO model that is specific to your own use of that information. Database-centric applications had to contend with this issue long before XML gained prominence. In the enterprise world it has been the norm to write OO applications that deal with data in relational databases. It has always been important in such applications to factor out the data model that must be shared within the enterprise from the OO model that is specific to one application that needs to use that data. XML has not fundamentally changed that; it has simply provided a richer, more flexible mechanism for dealing with that shared data. XML doesn't solve every problem, either. XML and OO can be useful complements to each other; neither is the end-all or be-all of computing.
|
