Chapter 8 - Building Your Application—Effective Object-Oriented Construction Techniques

Summary

What We'll Learn in This Chapter

Why the right attitude is everything when coding object-oriented (OO) applications.

How to work with attributes effectively to make your applications easier to maintain and enhance.

How to develop high-quality methods and classes.

What tools you can use to enhance the development process.

How to organize your development efforts around the class-type architecture in an effective manner.

One of the most important lessons that you can learn about building applications is that there is more to it than coding. In this chapter we will discover a multitude of techniques that you can use to improve your application construction efforts. Everything covered in this chapter is applicable to any object-oriented (OO) language that you work in. This is important because it will help to give you skills that you can apply when you are working in any OO development environment, and not just in the one that you have today. The best skills are the ones that you can transfer to your next project.

Programming, or more accurately construction, is an important part of the development process. We'll discuss solutions for several common coding problems as well as how to organize your development efforts around the class-type architecture presented in chapter 3. The most important lesson that you can learn in this chapter is that good programmers realize that there is more to development than programming and that great programmers realize that there is more to development than development.