A Quick Trip to Objectland: Object-Oriented Programming with Smalltalk.

We are all aware of the dizzying rate of change in today's world. To cope with the stresses that change brings, organizations that rely on computers must have access to software that is reusable, flexible, and capable of evolving with organizational needs.

The object oriented approach provides these capabilities and more. Not just a style of coding, object orientation is a way of thinking. Developers within this paradigm model the entities around them as software structures called "objects", group those objects into meaningful classes, and attach action-sequences (called "methods") to those classes and objects. In contrast with traditional software engineering which synthesizes sequences of steps, processes, and procedures, object oriented designers create whole worlds in software -- worlds whose inhabitants interact, inherit properties and behavior, and respond in individualized ways when you give them a job to do.

Compared to traditional approaches to software development, object oriented design makes it easier to model a business problem and make the model comprehensible to a computer. So ingrown are traditional approaches, however, that some organizations find it difficult to jump on the OO bandwagon. Heavy investment (financial, intellectual, and emotional) sometimes sets up insurmountable hurdles.

The Feature Article -- an installment of the "Objects in the Shell Game" series -- looks at NEXPERT OBJECT, the feature-rich expert system development tool from Neuron Data. The article's emphasis is on object oriented concepts in knowledge representation -- i.e., on building expert systems that incorporate object oriented thinking. In "Common LISP Interface Manager", Chris Richardson, Colin Meldrum, and Scott McKay discuss the object oriented architecture of a software tool for developing portable GUIs for LISP-based applications. Ron Schultz's "Vendor's Forum" details BOCS, Berard Software Engineering's CASE tool that supports object oriented system development. Charles Darling reviews Emergent Behavior's MicroGA, a C++-based package for building and exploring genetic algorithms. (As Darling points out, OOP provides a powerful way of capturing the ideas behind genetic algorithms.) Andrew Stevenson reviews A Quick Trip to ObjectLand, Gene Korienek and Tom Wrensch's introduction to OOP and Smalltalk.

We bring you articles and reviews on other topics as well. Judith Markowitz ("Number Please") explores telephone-based automatic speech recognition. Lisa Lewinson ("Fractal Databases") presents an exciting new approach to data management. Scott Webber ("Customer Support: An Opportunity for AI") shows how Artificial Intelligence can help businesses help their customers. Technical Editor Hal Berghel examines the Active Prolog Tutor, a product of Amzi! (formerly Amziod). I review EZ-Xpert, an expert system shell from TRIMMer Software. As always, our Buyer's Guide keeps you up-to-date on a wide variety of software products. Let's get started.

Joseph Schmuller