Your First JFace Application

Abstract

Picasso, in his abstract art, painted only the essential elements of his subject matter. Business proposals and other writings often carry abstracts, or summarizations, of their contents. In this vein, object-oriented programming preaches abstraction: the elimination of the extraneous and the retention of only the necessary. For example, if you’re developing management software for veterinarians, you’ll create a Dog class (derived from a Pet class) that contains pertinent data about dogs. This Dog class represents an abstraction of real-life dogs, in that it doesn’t model a dog exactly; it only models the aspects of dogs necessary for the software. For example, you wouldn’t include a chew (Shoe shoe) method or a lickEmbarrassingly() method because your software has no need to model these dog actions. Distilling an object to the minimum representation required reduces complexity, accelerates development, and slashes defects.