Object Oriented Systems Characterstics

Object-Oriented Systems development includes a collection of self-contained objects that encompass data and processes. Object oriented approach can use any of traditional approaches in developing information systems. Traditional systems usually either process-centric or data-centric. Object oriented approach become popular because of its several major concepts like real world systems involvement, use case driven, architecture centric, iterative-incremental, polymorphism, encapsulation, information hiding, inheritance and modularity.

Encapsulation is a process of combining data and methods of a class into single entity. Object oriented approaches encapsulates methods and information in to entities called objects. Information hiding is the process of hiding unnecessary information and publishing only the data required to interact with object via well-defined simple interface. It implies that only required information to be passed to the object and the information returned from the object are published. The detailed functionality of implementation is hidden. Encapsulation and information hiding are essential characteristics of object oriented systems because encapsulation can be achieve through information hiding, which is process of hiding the secret information of an object and publishing only the essential characteristics of objects in a single capsule.

In general, Polymorphism is an ability to appear in many forms. In Object oriented systems, polymorphism is that the same message can be interpreted as many classes of objects.  It refers to an ability to process objects differently regardless of their type or class. To send a message to an object, different pieces of information need to be gathered and object is responsible for interpretation of message appropriately. Though the messages are identical, each object responds appropriately is Polymorphism.