There are many programming paradigms that software development companies use. One of the most popular and longest-lasting has been object-oriented design. This pattern is so popular because it best mimics real life for so many scenarios and leads to clean, understandable software. To see why this paradigm is so popular, let’s first examine what object-oriented design is and how developers use it to build world-class software.

Object-Oriented Design: Mimicking the Physical World

Object-oriented design is one of the leading ways to design software because it mimics real life. In software, an object can have various properties and perform tasks. For example, a car object might have the properties “color,” “make,” and “model.” It might have functions like “accelerate” or “brake.”

Using these building blocks as design patterns means creating models of entities in the physical world. Consider blogging software like WordPress. A user can have a profile picture, a username, password, and more. There are also posts that have titles, bodies, and pictures. Furthermore, a site has pages that have other properties.

With this design, relationships between the objects – and how they interact with each other – also become self-evident. A user can author a blog post and can create a page. A page can link to a blog post and vice-versa.

Indeed, this design pattern lets developers think of a system as a series of objects and how they interact with each other.

How Will This Pattern Help Build Great Software?

The software industry widely uses the object-oriented design pattern. Indeed, games, websites, services, social networks, and more all use this design pattern under the hood. Facebook, for example, is a set of objects, as evidenced by GraphQL to help traverse a vast network of these objects and their relationships with one another.

The other benefit of this pattern is that it allows for rapid prototyping and testing. Once you identify the objects that will comprise a system, you can quickly mock them – including all the user interfaces – to see how the final software product will look. Going back to the example of Facebook, if you identify users and posts, you can easily create a prototype containing some fake users and fake posts to get a feel for how the social network would look. If you’re doing an internal accounting program, you could mock the transaction, user, and account objects to feel how the program would look and function when developed.

Indeed, that’s the power of this design pattern: it’s analogous to the real world, and it allows for rapid prototyping. That’s why so many of the world’s leading companies use it!

Consider This Design Pattern for Your Software

No matter what type of software you’re building, consider implementing an object-oriented design. Unless you are making something specialized, there’s a good chance that this pattern will work for your app. Think about what objects, interfaces, and relations exist and work to code those for a prototype. Once the prototype looks good, you can code the objects more fully, complete with all the appropriate business logic.

At INVID Group, we have extensive experience building software with object-oriented design patterns. If you would like a custom quote for your project, please feel free to contact us!