Design Recipe

The design recipe has two characteristics, chronology and modeling.

Chronology

As we design programs, we are inherently concerned with the order in which things happen. In the most general terms, a program is characterized by:

As you discovered in CS1101, the skeletal structure of programs can be made to match the structure of the input.

Modeling

To provide a better understanding of how your program processes its information, we also are concerned with identifying the concepts that will be used throughout the program. The primary advantage of object-oriented design is to use programming concepts such as classes that map directly to the concepts found in the requirements document. Thus, when the input speaks of "reading in a student record", during processing you will create an object-oriented class that represents the student record.

Once the classes are defined, the basic building blocks of the computations become methods on these classes, while fields store information about the state of the computations. The goal of the designer is to decompose the desired processing into a series of method invocations over the objects that are constructed during the input processing phase. Thus, in tandem with the chronology above, object-oriented programs typically exhibit the following behavior:

Form Follows Function

We will start with a simplified design recipe. As we tackle more complex problems, and introduce different aspects of the Java language, the design recipe will be revised accordingly.