Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
Part I
From Vision to Mission
This rst part of this topic takes a thorough look at the early intentions
of object-oriented programming and the implications thereof. Java can
be seen as the first programming language consistently developed with
software objects. This evolutionary step, wrapping up three decades of
experience and experiments with software objects becomes apparent by
comparing objects to independent electronic devices.
It is barely possible to find an introduction to software objects without
a reference to the real world. This topic thus uses the analogy of objects
representing real physical objects in general and in detail. A look at models
in physics will help to grasp the terms \real" and \physical" to introduce
the idea of real-world modeling. Physical laws are represented by mathe-
matical formulas for dedicated coordinate systems and real-world values.
From a good understanding of software objects, devices, and physical
things, a vision is derived to create a virtual world reflecting the real world.
A modern GPS smart phone makes it easy for anyone to implement a client
software object to collect real-world data and transmit it to a server. The
server application can validate different client data against each other and
against third-party sources to serve as a reliable source of bundled real-
world data.
Naturally, the vision of a real-world simulator leaves plenty of room
for discussions and raises different expectations. Therefore a rough object-
oriented analysis (OOA) is used to formalize the vague vision into a software
architecture to enable distributed development of the individual compo-
nents. The mission of this topic is to discuss the idea of aRealObject
ApplicationFrameworkand provide a \minimum implementation with
maximum abstraction." This implementation should encourage the reader
to develop his own scenario and establish a life cycle development of the
roaf
library in a community process at the website
www.roaf.de
.
