Object Technology

Object Technology began development in the early 1980’s. Founded on research designed to maximize the re-usability of software, Object Technology (OT) creates Objects that reflect real-world entities, and Methods that implement the way Objects behave.

As is often the case, this new technology has taken a long time to get to market. Two fundamental problems impeded its deployment in practical business applications: hardware costs and the lack of suitable software infrastructures.

Object Technology demands more memory and processing power than traditional software development environments. The cost differential has been large enough, until recently, for end-users of business applications to avoid OT-based solutions. Today, much better price/performance values are available from hardware suppliers.

True Object Technology is rigid and inflexible when developing Transaction types of applications. For this reason, Thoroughbred’s OPENworkshop is defined as “Object Oriented”. Object Oriented provides the flexibility in developing applications for “real world” business applications, by allowing the Object Rules to be modified and enhanced when needed to satisfy application requirements. Most available OT-based systems are usually Object Oriented because of this flexibility.

Enormous development efforts have been put into operating systems and utilities over the history of commercial computing. They have combined to create a wealth of resources available for application developers to use in their solutions. Early attempts to deliver OT-based development environments ignored these resources in a drive to overturn traditional architectures. Now, mainstream environment developers have found ways to deliver Object Technology while leveraging on the available infrastructures.

As a result, practical OT-based solutions are now deliverable, and we can expect to see significant market growth as the “early adopters” consolidate their positions.

From the OPENworkshop Reference, version 8.9.1. Open this page in the PDF