Case study

Our case study will span many of the chapters of this book. We'll be examining a single problem closely from a variety of perspectives. It's very important to look at alternative designs and design patterns; more than once, we'll point out that there's no single right answer: there are a number of good answers. Our intent here is to provide a realistic example that involves realistic depth and complications and leads to difficult trade-off decisions. Our goal is to help the reader apply object-oriented programming and design concepts. This means choosing among the technical alternatives to create something useful.

This first part of the case study is an overview of the problem and why we're tackling it. This background will cover a number of aspects of the problem to set up the design and construction of solutions in later chapters. Part of this overview will include some UML diagrams to capture elements of the problem to be solved. These will...