When talking about the failings of top-down development, Bertrand Meyer says “Real systems have no top.’[1] And yet the GUI-based applications we produce run counter to this: our code typically does have a “top,” at least from the user’s perspective. The top in this case is the user interface, the collection of mini-scripted activities that we provide to allow our users to interact with our underlying application. Everything else in a typical interactive application is there simply to support this GUI, and this affects the way we both design and implement the code.
Interestingly, Naked Object applications (www.nakedobjects.org) do not have a top in this sense: the user is instead presented with a group of business classes and business objects. The user is free to interact with them in any way that makes sense.
If Meyer is correct (and I think he is), then Naked Object systems do indeed seem to be closer to the true spirit of OO development.
[1] Bertrand Meyer, Object-Oriented Software Construction, 2nd ed
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