A framework is a set of classes that embodies an abstract design for solutions to a family of related problems (RalphJohnson and B. Foote, Journal of Object-Oriented Programming 1(2), 1988).

You can specialize and/or instantiate these classes to implement an application or subsystem. Typical issues:

• Frameworks adopt an inverse control flow, sometimes called the Holywood Principle (don't call us, we'll call you): in contrast with a library, the methods you define to use the framework get called by the framework (for example through call backs or inheritance).
• Design patterns can be used to document the structure of frameworks -- for example IBM's San Francisco relies on the ModelViewControler^? pattern.
• The interface between the framework and the application-specific parts built on top of it is realized as a set of extension points, or hot spots.

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Resources

• The frameworks homepage at http://www.ipd.hk-r.se/michaelm/fwpages/frameworks.html
• The OOPSLA conferences
• The series of three books edited by Mohammed Fayad -- see http://www.cse.unl.edu/~fayad/ published by Addison Wesley.
• The Framework Editor Fred from the University of Helsinki, http://practise.cs.tut.fi/fred/

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A well known industrial framework is IBM's San Francisco

• see http://www-4.ibm.com/software/ad/sanfrancisco/library/
• and http://www-4.ibm.com/software/ad/sanfrancisco/library/concepts.html for an introduction.

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The relationship between frameworks and DomainSpecificLanguages is explored in:

• DonRoberts and RalphJohnson. Evolve frameworks into domain-specific languages. In 3rd International Conference on Pattern Languages, Allerton Park, Ill., September 1996. -- see http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/47194.html, http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/roberts96evolving.html
• ArieVanDeursen. Domain-Specific Languages versus Object-Oriented Frameworks: A Financial Engineering Case Study. In Proceedings Smalltalk and Java in Industry and Academia, pages 35-39. Ilmenau Technical University, 1997.

Both are discussed in the DSLAnnotatedBibliography as well.

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CategoryArchitecture | Contributions by ArieVanDeursen