Black-box reuse within frameworks based on visual programming
Bernhard Wagner, Ian Sluijmers, Dominik Eichelberg, Philipp Ackerman · 1998
Application frameworks allow structured reuse of object-oriented design and source code, provided that the developer understands the source code and has knowledge of the framework 's design conventions. The notion "white-box reuse" refers to the process of developing software by writing subclasses with the knowledge and understanding of the internals of the parent classes. When applying black-box reuse however, new functionality is obtained by composing objects without knowing their internals, only their interface. We took the idea of object composition a step further by developing a visual programming environment for the easy reuse of a multimedia application framework's classes. Instantiations of these classes are represented as black-box components in our visual programming environment. 1. Introduction 1.1. The Multimedia Application Framework MET++ Our visual programming environment is based on the existing multimedia application framework MET++ [Acke95] which is an extension to ...