Naked Objects
By Richard Pawson and Robert Matthews

Introducing 'naked objects'

The DSFA project was our first demonstration that it was possible to design a large-scale mission-critical business system from a set of behaviourally-complete business objects, that were exposed directly to the user instead of being masked behind a conventional user interface. During the project we found ourselves referring to such business objects as 'naked objects'.

Following that success, we wanted to create a general-purpose framework to enable this concept to be more broadly applied. We took the simple Java-based prototyping framework that we had used to build the Child Benefit prototype illustrated in the case study, and re-built it from scratch to make it viable as an implementation tool. This meant addressing the issues of object persistence, sharing and distribution.

That framework is now known as Naked Objects.