Naked Objects - Definition

Definition

The naked objects pattern is defined by three principles:

1. All business logic should be encapsulated onto the domain objects. This principle is not unique to naked objects: it is just a strong commitment to encapsulation.
2. The user interface should be a direct representation of the domain objects, with all user actions consisting, explicitly, of creating or retrieving domain objects and/or invoking methods on those objects. This principle is also not unique to naked objects: it is just a specific interpretation of an object-oriented user interface (OOUI).
   The original idea in the naked objects pattern arises from the combination of these two, to form the third principle:
3. The user interface should be created 100% automatically from the definition of the domain objects. This may be done using several different technologies, including source code generation; implementations of the naked objects pattern to date have favoured the technology of reflection.

The naked objects pattern was first described formally in Richard Pawson's PhD thesis which includes a thorough investigation of various antecedents and inspirations for the pattern including, for example, the Morphic user interface.

Naked Objects is commonly contrasted with the model-view-controller pattern. However, the published version of Pawson's thesis (see References) contains a foreword by Trygve Reenskaug, who first formulated the model-view-controller pattern, suggesting that naked objects is closer to the original intent of model-view-controller (MVC) than many of the subsequent interpretations and implementations.