Components as Static Abstractions

In such languages various strategies are typically used by programmers to have objects as composable entities, such as defining a class that encapsulates a single object (instance). Another strategy, heavily used in the NeXTStep environment, is to define complex archiving procedures so that groups of objects can be stored into files (so-called “nib” files); the corresponding files can then be composed and the resulting configuration used to recreate at run-time the collection of objects defined in the individual groups. In cases like this, where the structure of the objects composing a user interface is known statically and
does not evolve at run-time, the ability to directly store objects would be much more convenient than writing programs or description files that will dynamically recreate a configuration of objects.