OOP Terminology

Question 1

OOP

Answer 1

Object-oriented design is the process of planning a system of interacting objects for the purpose of solving a software problem.

Question 2

Encapsulation

Answer 2

Combining fields and methods describing an object into one class. In encapsulation the variables of a class will be hidden from other classes and can be accessed only through the methods of their current class.

Question 3

Access modifier

Answer 3

A keyword defining the visibility of a method or field in a class. Private access modifier indicates that the field or method is only visible inside the class, public indicates it is available outside the class.

Question 4

Method overriding

Answer 4

A language feature that allows a subclass to provide a specific implementation of a method that is already produced by one of the superclasses

Question 5

Method overloading

Answer 5

A feature of classes that allows for there to have more that one method of the same name provided that their argument lists differ.

Question 6

Constructor

Answer 6

A constructor is a method that instantiates an object and assigns values to the attributes/fields of an object. The two types are default constructors and parameterised constructors

Question 7

Instance of object

Answer 7

A concrete occurrence of any object, existing during the runtime of a program.

Question 8

Mutator method

Answer 8

Commonly known as a set method. A method in object-oriented programming that changes the value of an object’s field/attributes.

Question 9

Accessor method

Answer 9

A typed method (function) that returns the value of a private field in an object.

Question 10

Polymorphic

Answer 10

A programming language’s ability to process objects differently depending on their data type or class. For example, method overriding and method overloading.

Question 11

Data redundancy

Answer 11

Data redundancy occurs in database systems where a field is repeated unnecessarily as a result of a one-to-many or many-to-many relationship.

Question 12

Data mining

Answer 12

The use of sophisticated software to examine a large volume of information stored in many databases on-line to discover patterns and trends. Usually aimed at transforming large volumes of unstructured data in a form that can be used to make decisions.

Question 13

Data warehousing

Answer 13

A data warehouse is a database storing data from many sources over a period of time for reporting and data analysis in order to make decisions.

Question 14

Data dependence

Answer 14

A data dependency in a database is where one field has a dependency or relationship with another field. For example, knowing a person’s ID number can produce their name.

Question 15

Data validation

Answer 15

Checking that captured data is logically correct and falls within acceptable ranges for that data. Validation is performed at the time of input.

Question 16

Class

Answer 16

A class is the definition used to create instances of itself, called objects. Classes define the attributes and methods that each object created from that class will have.

Question 17

Object

Answer 17

An instance of a class created by running the constructor method of the class. The Object inherits the attributes and methods defined in the class