 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(November 2019) |
In computer science, a public interface is the logical point at which independent software entities interact. The entities may interact with each other within a single computer, across a network, or across a variety of other topologies.
It is important that public interfaces will be stable and designed to support future changes, enhancements, and deprecation in order for the interaction to continue.
 | This article contains instructions, advice, or how-to content .(November 2019) |
A project must provide additional documents that describe plans and procedures that can be used to evaluate the project’s compliance.
The programmer must create fully insulated classes and insulate the public interfaces from compile-time dependencies.
Various methodologies, such as refactoring, support the determination of interfaces. Refactoring generally applies to the entire software implementation, but is especially helpful in properly flushing out interfaces. There are other approaches defined through the pattern community. [1]
In object-oriented programming, a class is an extensible program-code-template for creating objects, providing initial values for state and implementations of behavior. In many languages, the class name is used as the name for the class, the name for the default constructor of the class, and as the type of objects generated by instantiating the class; these distinct concepts are easily conflated. Although, to the point of conflation, one could argue that is a feature inherent in a language because of its polymorphic nature and why these languages are so powerful, dynamic and adaptable for use compared to languages without polymorphism present. Thus they can model dynamic systems more easily.
Java and C++ are two prominent object-oriented programming languages. By many language popularity metrics, the two languages have dominated object-oriented and high-performance software development for much of the 21st century, and are often directly compared and contrasted. Java appeared about 10 years later and its syntax was based on C/C++.
C++ is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significantly over time, and modern C++ now has object-oriented, generic, and functional features in addition to facilities for low-level memory manipulation. It is almost always implemented as a compiled language, and many vendors provide C++ compilers, including the Free Software Foundation, LLVM, Microsoft, Intel, Embarcadero, Oracle, and IBM, so it is available on many platforms.
In software engineering, the mediator pattern defines an object that encapsulates how a set of objects interact. This pattern is considered to be a behavioral pattern due to the way it can alter the program's running behavior.
In software design and engineering, the observer pattern is a software design pattern in which an object, named the subject, maintains a list of its dependents, called observers, and notifies them automatically of any state changes, usually by calling one of their methods.
A method in object-oriented programming (OOP) is a procedure associated with a message and an object. An object consists of state data and behavior; these compose an interface, which specifies how the object may be utilized by any of its various consumers. A method is a behavior of an object parametrized by a consumer.
In object-oriented programming, in languages such as C++, and Object Pascal, a virtual function or virtual method is an inheritable and overridable function or method for which dynamic dispatch is facilitated. This concept is an important part of the (runtime) polymorphism portion of object-oriented programming (OOP). In short, a virtual function defines a target function to be executed, but the target might not be known at compile time.
In computing, an interface is a shared boundary across which two or more separate components of a computer system exchange information. The exchange can be between software, computer hardware, peripheral devices, humans, and combinations of these. Some computer hardware devices, such as a touchscreen, can both send and receive data through the interface, while others such as a mouse or microphone may only provide an interface to send data to a given system.
In computer programming, a virtual method table (VMT), virtual function table, virtual call table, dispatch table, vtable, or vftable is a mechanism used in a programming language to support dynamic dispatch.
A node is a basic unit of a data structure, such as a linked list or tree data structure. Nodes contain data and also may link to other nodes. Links between nodes are often implemented by pointers.
In computing and systems design, a loosely coupled system is one
Managed Extensions for C++ or Managed C++ is a now-deprecated set of language extensions for C++, including grammatical and syntactic extensions, keywords and attributes, to bring the C++ syntax and language to the .NET Framework. These extensions were created by Microsoft to allow C++ code to be targeted to the Common Language Runtime (CLR) in the form of managed code, as well as continue to interoperate with native code.
In object-oriented programming, a destructor is a method which is invoked mechanically just before the memory of the object is released. It can happen when its lifetime is bound to scope and the execution leaves the scope, when it is embedded in another object whose lifetime ends, or when it was allocated dynamically and is released explicitly. Its main purpose is to free the resources which were acquired by the object during its life and/or deregister from other entities which may keep references to it. Use of destructors is needed for the process of Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII).
In computer programming, an opaque pointer is a special case of an opaque data type, a data type declared to be a pointer to a record or data structure of some unspecified type.
In object-oriented programming, inheritance is the mechanism of basing an object or class upon another object or class, retaining similar implementation. Also defined as deriving new classes from existing ones such as super class or base class and then forming them into a hierarchy of classes. In most class-based object-oriented languages, an object created through inheritance, a "child object", acquires all the properties and behaviors of the "parent object", with the exception of: constructors, destructor, overloaded operators and friend functions of the base class. Inheritance allows programmers to create classes that are built upon existing classes, to specify a new implementation while maintaining the same behaviors, to reuse code and to independently extend original software via public classes and interfaces. The relationships of objects or classes through inheritance give rise to a directed acyclic graph.
The curiously recurring template pattern (CRTP) is an idiom, originally in C++, in which a class X derives from a class template instantiation using X itself as a template argument. More generally it is known as F-bound polymorphism, and it is a form of F-bounded quantification.
Object-oriented design (OOD) is the process of planning a system of interacting objects for the purpose of solving a software problem. It is one approach to software design.
In object-oriented computer programming, a null object is an object with no referenced value or with defined neutral (null) behavior. The null object design pattern, which describes the uses of such objects and their behavior, was first published as "Void Value" and later in the Pattern Languages of Program Design book series as "Null Object".
Component Object Model (COM) is a binary-interface standard for software components introduced by Microsoft in 1993. It is used to enable inter-process communication object creation in a large range of programming languages. COM is the basis for several other Microsoft technologies and frameworks, including OLE, OLE Automation, Browser Helper Object, ActiveX, COM+, DCOM, the Windows shell, DirectX, UMDF and Windows Runtime. The essence of COM is a language-neutral way of implementing objects that can be used in environments different from the one in which they were created, even across machine boundaries. For well-authored components, COM allows reuse of objects with no knowledge of their internal implementation, as it forces component implementers to provide well-defined interfaces that are separated from the implementation. The different allocation semantics of languages are accommodated by making objects responsible for their own creation and destruction through reference-counting. Type conversion casting between different interfaces of an object is achieved through the QueryInterface method. The preferred method of "inheritance" within COM is the creation of sub-objects to which method "calls" are delegated.
Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system. Objective-C was the standard programming language supported by Apple for developing macOS and iOS applications using their respective application programming interfaces (APIs), Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, until the introduction of Swift in 2014.