OBJECT TECHNOLOGY - A VIRTUAL ROUND-TABLE

Software development is a difficult and time-consuming process. As sof tware systems become larger and ever more complex, developers are sear ching for mechanisms to control that complexity. The main goals have a lways been to lower the cost and improve productivity, reuse, and main tainability. The procedure-oriented paradigm and structured programmin g were popular for a while, and their fundamentals may still be valid. Today, however, OO is being heralded by many as one promising solutio n. This roundtable contains an assortment of short articles from both industry and academia on aspects of object orientation: distributed ob jects in the client-server environment, standardization efforts to ens ure cross-platform interoperability, object technology and parallel co mputing, object-oriented databases, the problems inherent in OO testin g, and, finally, the theoretical foundations of object-based programmi ng.