Companies count pure object cost

Companies have wasted millions of pounds because pure object orientation techniques are too cumbersome for most corporate application development purposes.

According to consultancy Butler Group, companies would have been better off using component-based development tools. It estimated that only four per cent of users had achieved the promise of reuse.

Carl Potter, head of research at the Butler Group, said: ?Object orientation as a pure methodology is too cumbersome. Concepts such as inheritance are very constraining and if your specifications change halfway through the project, it is difficult to make alterations.

You?re better off using a repository-based tool to develop components because you can change the business rules more easily without worrying about the knock-on effect. You can link design with code generation, which is a faster, smoother process.?

He said that pure object methods were more appropriate for Vars developing frameworks that could be tailored for specific industries.

?With components, you can programme to solve your business problem rather than try to deal with future problems. You don?t have to worry about the history of the object or inheritence factors, but you get all the benefits of encapsulation,? Potter said.

He added that the corporate uptake of objects had been very slow and that projects were mainly small scale with short delivery times. Most development was client-based and did not involve building mission critical applications.

Java was different, he said, because it was not being used for client/server replacement systems, but was network-centric.