Foundation Object Model Classes

The first category of the Foundation functions callable by application developers is the Object Model Classes. These classes provide the basic structure for San Francisco objects and frameworks. In effect they define the application model that is used when building San Francisco applications and frameworks. The classes contain both complete methods that are inherited and used by application developers as well as abstract definitions for methods that may be implemented by developers of application business objects.

The Object Model Classes provide a consistent object model that will fit a wide range of distributed applications. Application developers build OO applications and frameworks by using the base classes and interfaces instead of defining their own object architecture and coding to platform specific interfaces. They allow the developers to specify different options such as default location and locks, or object identification approach. The interfaces may be implemented differently, to exploit the advantages of each platform, but the behavior seen by the developer is the same regardless of which platform is used.