19 Concepts of Object-Oriented Programming

Raimund Ege
Florida International University, ege@cs.fiu.edu

This tutorial defines and teaches the basic object-oriented concepts, illustrates their advantages, and introduces the components and features of object-oriented programming languages and development environments. The tutorial enables an attendee to make an informed decision about what language/environment will best serve his/her software development needs.

The tutorial has 2 major parts:

Part 1 discusses in detail all object-oriented concepts and uses UML and Java to illustrate them. The focus will be on a precise non- confusing definition of the core concepts and terminology. Basic object-oriented concepts, such as object, instance, class, interface, attribute, service, message passing, hierarchy, inheritance, polymorphism, late binding, memory management, access specification and packaging.

Part 2 then compares the major object-oriented programming languages: C++, Java, C#, and others. The comparison is done with a double focus: (1) how does the language support and enforce the concepts, and (2) how does the language help software development (to that effect, I have a small case study program, that will be solved in all languages). Whether and how each language supports advanced concepts, like multiple and repeated inheritance, genericity, interfaces, is discussed in detail.

Attendee background

Attendees are software professionals who are interested in learning the fundamental concepts and advantages of object-oriented programming and how to apply them in a modern software development environment. No previous knowledge of object-oriented concepts is assumed. The attendees should have a fundamental background in computer science and/or computer programming.

Format

Lecture

Presenter

Raimund K. Ege is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Florida International University, Miami. He is author of Programming in an Object-Oriented Environment (Academic Press, 1992) and Object- Oriented Programming with C++ (Academic Press, 1994). He is an active researcher in the area of object-oriented concepts, and their application to programming, user interfaces, databases, simulation and software engineering. He has presented numerous successful tutorials at major conferences (OOPSLA, ECOOP, TOOLS). The tutorials were consistently rated highest and won praise from organizers and attendees.