What is process oriented development and object oriented development?

Answer 1

Process oriented development is the analysis of functional requests and design of associated computer programmsfrom the viewpoint of the underlying (business) process. This means that the flow of the process is used to detemine the overall structure of the application programm. It is usually combined with user interaction analysis, e.g. with UML usecase diagramms. In contrast the Object Oriented paradigm is often used when building the application. Object orientation usually applies to both the design and development of application programms. The idea is to tie functional code to object types or classes (e.g. client, car, invoice) that are elemental in the desired solution. It is then easier to identify code that needs to be modified for a specific change in the application. The benefits were supposed to be reusabillity of objects and code. In the technical domain these benefits have often been realized, in the business domain this is still an open question. The two aproaches are often used complementary in business application analysis and design. See an example below, which has been kept simple, so some processes like financing, client defaulting, car repossession, etc have been left out. Business goal: manage car lease Processes identified: Application entry, review and acceptance, car delivery, periodical invoice, payment receipt, lease ending. For each process triggers, necessary data, input screens and reporting are identified and organized into a flow. Object Type identification: client, car, contract, driver, invoice, payment, period (period is required for invoicing). In Object Orientation lingo these are called Classes or sometimes Object Types. Every class gets data assigned, like 'Name, address, client type (person/business)' for client. In this example this would lead to the identification of two new classes: business and person. Every class gets functions assigned: client.make_invoice, client.send_invoice, client.revoke_contract, etc. In the design phase it is now possible to map the data, screens and reports from the process analysis to the objects and functions of the object analysis. In this phase the triggers are used to logically tie everything together. Most modern development environments are also object oriented. Consequently the programmer will use predefined general classes from the development environment, like 'screen', 'input', 'selection box', 'report', etc while building the application. Thus every screen and report gets its own object. This makes it easier to reuse these in different processes.