Steve Maine, insightful as always, explains his own view on the limitations of object-oriented solutions applied to business problems. Personally I run into object bigotry every day at my employer. The vast majority of the company uses various flavors of Java (write once, run anywhere? Nah…) and we (as in the Microsoft team) get joked for even considering using DataSets. I’m a big a fan of Fowler’s PoEAA, and I guess most people miss where Fowler draws the delineation of the applicability of the domain model, which I consider almost analogous to “object-oriented solution”.

Is there a place for traditional OO approaches? Yes, and Steve Maine makes it very clear, almost simplistic, in his post when it is applicable and when it is not. The key point is to work with the business problem, not force your technological preconceptions against it. Working with the problem would be what Brooks would call the “essence”, and the force-fitting would be the “accident”.