A few years ago, I first became aware of the concept of Value Objects. Unlike most objects you might use in a design, the identity of a value object is completely unimportant. Instead, the value of the object is all that is important. This leads to a couple of interesting design decisions: Value objects tend… Read More »
Many programs have a need to store program state to disk at various points. An approach used by many of these programs is to serialize the objects representing the program state directly to disk (or a database). Back in 2004 (XML-Serialized Objects and Coupling), I described a coupling problem caused by automatically serializing objects to… Read More »
Long ago, I was trying to convince a friend of mine that Object Oriented programming was not all just snake oil when he asked me a fundamental question. What’s the difference between an object and a thingie? In some ways, this question has guided my understanding of objects ever since. Fundamentally, what makes one collection… Read More »
Over the last few years, I have spent a lot of time talking to lots of different people about object-oriented programming (OOP). I have spent a fair portion of the last three years interviewing and screening people over the phone for development positions. This activity has caused me to spend some time re-evaluating what I… Read More »
Several times in the last few years, I have written about the subject of memory management, garbage collection, and object lifetime. Some of essays I’ve written on this subject include: The Semantics of Garbage Collection More Thoughts on Resource Recovery Other Resource Recovery Approaches Resource Management Revisited Recently, I was thinking about this issue again… Read More »
Several newer languages (as in less than 10 years old) have been designed around the idea that everything is an object. Since I started programming professionally almost two decades ago, I was programming before the object craze became mainstream. I have done the OO thing for over a decade and am not as impressed as… Read More »
In The Semantics of Garbage Collection, I explained why I don’t like the term garbage collection. I also introduced the term resource recovery, and suggested that this change in naming could generate a useful change in viewpoint. In the next article, More Thoughts on Resource Recovery, I traced some of the history and side effects… Read More »
What does it mean for an object to die? In C++, there are several distinct and well-defined stages in the death of an object. Other languages do this a little differently, but the general concepts remain the same. This is the basic chain of events for an item on the stack. Object becomes inaccessible Object… Read More »
When talking about Object Oriented Programming, there are several principles that are normally associated with the paradigm: polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation, etc. I feel that people tend to forget the first, most important principle of OOP: object lifetime. One of the first things that struck me when I was learning OOP in the C++ programming language… Read More »
Although the debate continues to rage between the XML as documents camp and the XML as data camp, it seems reasonable to believe that both styles are here to stay. I have noticed one trend in XML data that strikes me as déjà vu all over again. There seem to be a large number of… Read More »