Making Things Talk

X MAKING THINGS TALK

For a couple of decades now, computer scientists have

used the term object-oriented programming to refer to

a style of software development in which programs and

subprograms are thought of as objects. Like physical

objects, they have properties and behaviors. They inherit

these properties from the prototypes from which they

descend. The canonical form of any object in software is

the code that describes its type. Software objects make it

easy to recombine objects in novel ways. You can reuse a

software object, if you know its interface, the collection of

properties and methods that its creator allows you access

to (and documents, so that you know how to use them). It

doesn’t matter how a software object does what it does,

as long as it does it consistently. Software objects are

most effective when they’re easy to understand and when

they work well with other objects.

Who This Book Is For

This book is written for people who want to make things talk to other things. Maybe you’re

a science teacher who wants to show your students how to monitor weather conditions at

several locations around your school district simultaneously, or a sculptor who wants to

make a whole room of choreographed mechanical sculptures. You might be an industrial

designer who needs to be able to build quick mockups of new products, modeling both

their forms and their functions. Maybe you’r ...