Framework component systems: Concepts, design heuristics, and perspectives

An appropriate combination of object-oriented programming concepts allows not only the development of single reusable components but also of semifinished architectures (=frameworks). The paper first discusses the concepts underlying frameworks and goes on to present design heuristics for developing such component architectures: Though design patterns are currently heralded as state-of-the-art in supporting framework development, a link between design patterns that capture and communicate proven object-oriented design and the framework development process is still missing. As pragmatic solution to this problem we introduce socalled hot spot cards to bridge the mentioned gap. These hot spot cards proved to be a valuable communication vehicle between domain experts and software engineers and thus helped to reduce the number of framework design iterations. An outlook sketches the perspectives and implications of framework technology.