Object model

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Object models are now used primarily as a design basis in object-oriented software development . With their help, static structures of classes and objects as well as their behavior and relations can be graphically illustrated and developed.

The most important properties of relationships in object models are hierarchy, abstraction, encapsulation , modularity and typing . In object-oriented software development, design is one of the most important steps in the development process. Therefore, with the Unified Modeling Language, a standard for the design of object models was created. However, object models are not only used to develop and visualize software modules. They are also a tool to represent complex systems in a simple way through abstraction. So one also finds object models of databases or hardware components, for example processors, albeit less often.

history

Object models emerged with the concept of the object, not only in the field of software development, in the 1970s. Initially, they were used to manage the complexity of large systems in various areas, such as database engineering and hardware development. Only through advances in various programming languages, but above all Simula 67 and Smalltalk , and research in the field of artificial intelligence , did they blossom into development tools for the software industry. In the hardware industry, too, they became more and more important for describing system architectures with increasing complexity.