Implementing Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Frameworks at Work

By: Fayad, Mohamed E.

Frameworks are reusable software architectures that work for an entire family of related applications. Due to their generic nature, mature frameworks can be reused for many applications, saving the corporation hundreds of thousands of pounds in software development costs. However, the costs of building a framework are impressive (typically cited at $1-8 million). Each chapter in this book is built around an actual case study or implementation of a framework development or adaptation project, with the overall intention being to document lessons learned in over 40 such examples by describing and explaining the process of design. Accompanied by a CD that contains example frameworks, some documentation, and implementation details in case study format

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471252018
• ISBN13: 9780471252016
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 729 Pages
• Weight: 3.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.7" x 1.9" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

An excelent walkt through framework technologies

An almost indispensable 3-volume reading to understand the success of framework technologies in today's software systems. The books include most of the top articles on the subject, providing a thorough insight in both design and implementation issues regarding frameworks, also complemented with practical experience about framework usage. Although the work is mainly concentrated on technical aspects, the articles are comprehensible enough to be taken as reference material by a broad community, for example, software engineers, programmers, or technology managers. The books are useful for anybody planning to include framework-based techniques in software development processes or planning to improve current object-oriented practices. It is also an excellent source for graduate courses.Volume 1 lays the fundamental concepts supporting object-oriented frameworks, and describes the problems and challenges that thistechnology raises in software development. The book covers topics such as domain analysis, development concepts and approaches,documentation, and management, among others. Of course, the compilation of articles makes some parts little redundant, but this is a minor detail compared with the fruitful contributions made by the book. In particular, the articles on reusing hooks, hot-spot-driven development, composing modeling frameworks in Catalysis, and composition problems, causes and solutions, are a sample of the outstanding level of this work. Each chapter adds at the end a number of related questions and student projects aiming to reinforce concepts and promote further investigation. As a comment, novice readers should take the sections concerning hooks and hot-spots carefully because these topics are presented in a slightly confusing way.Volume 2 focuses on specific framework implementations, dealing with existing frameworks for different application domains, such as businesses, multi-agent systems, languages and system software. In this book, the readers will find a level of detail much closer to specific implementations issues than in the previous volume. Nonetheless, the writing style remains mostly clear and accessible for a quite broad audience. The case-studies and experience reports described by the articles show an attractive industrial perspective of the framework approach, and more important, they go an step forward in the road of a more mature discipline for software development. In addition, aCD-Rom with concrete examples of these applications is included with the book.Volume 3 completes this series with a number of domain-specific application frameworks developed by industry, showing how to apply the concepts and ideas of the previous books in software products. In this line, it includes very interesting frameworks for manufacturing systems and distributed systems, among others. It also goes through concrete software scenarios, illustrating the benefits of combining domain knowledge and object-orientation expertise. Alth

Excellent guidelines to build OO Application Frameworks

This book in conjunction with the books Building Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Foundations of Framework Design and "Domain-Specific Application Frameworks: Frameworks Experience by Industry" are a series of three books that constitute a complete and necessary guide for the design and implementation of application frameworks. They are based on multiple academic and industrial contributors experience building a wide range of domain-specific application framework. These books are very easy to read and understand and you can learn from them not only what a framework and an application framework are, but also how to apply this technology to real world domains, like manufacturing, health care, distributed computing, real-time systems, simulation environments, ...First book, "Building Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Foundations of Framework Design" introduces application frameworks, their benefits and problems. It addresses all the fundamental concepts behind OO application frameworks and provides guidelines for OO application framework development. It is organized in eight parts. Part one provides a complete overview of OO application framework technology describing what is an application framework, what are the problems and benefits of application frameworks and how to use, develop and evaluate an application framework. Part Two presents some historical application frameworks and discusses some general guidelines to increase the reusability of application frameworks. Part Three describes how to build a framework analysing a concrete domain. The rest of the book provides all the necessary information to completely build an application framework. It presents all the concepts managed in framework development, which are the different development approaches, how to test the resulting frameworks, the problems derived from integration and a question sometimes forgotten but very important, the framework documentation. Second book, "Domain-Specific Application Frameworks: Frameworks Experience by Industry" is focused in the experience of industrial and academic contributors in the development of OO application framework in different domains. Each chapter covers step by step the complete development of an application framework in manufacturing, distributed systems, real-time systems, telecommunication, multimedia, chemistry and data visualization domains. It includes the motivation developers founded to choose application framework technology, the problems they had to solve and the final solutions they developed. This book, "Implementing Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Frameworks at Work", shows step by step how to implement application frameworks in different domains. It is organized in six parts covering examples about i) Business Frameworks with different examples in sales and administrative domains, ii) Artificial Intelligence, iii) Agent Application Frameworks, presenting interesting frameworks for speech recognition, neural netwo

Lessons learned from enterprise framework builders

Focusing primarily on business systems and agent-based application frameworks, it covers also programming languages and tools. You can find practical results and evaluation from expert framework builders.

An important collection of experience papers

The authors and contributors have provided an excellent collection of experiences for implementing application frameworks to solve real-world problems. I highly recommend this volume.

A gold mine of enterprise application frameworks

This book helps you to reduce the cost of framework development by providing 40 case studies, documenting the experiences framework builders and users at major corporations and research labs, world-wide. Throughout, the authors extract important lessons and highlight technical and organizational implementation practices that have been proven to yield the biggest pay off.This is why I choose this book.