Representing and querying reusable object frameworks
Hafedh Mili, Houari A. Sahraoui, Ilham Benyahia · 1997
It has kmg been recogm"zed that objects are too small units of reme to tmvide anv real ieverape IDeutsch,l 9891.When a set of obiects ar; oflen U.re; together to"u;ornp[ish aj%q"uently needed ~ask~it is worthwhik packaging them as a unit; this is what we call object jiameworks.There has been a lot of interest recently in the &sign, description, and use of object fkmteworks.We sel out to develop a representatwn ofjkzrneworks that satisfies the following, goals, (i) a description of inter-object behavior that supports both formal verifrcatwn and understanding, (ii) abstraction and generalization, (iii) support for reure related tasks such as searchability and description of usage, (iv) language-independence, and (v) an easy attraction of the descriptions from actual code.We propose a rnodei that attempts to address these often convicting goals, and discuss the major trade-offs, including on issues related to the abstraction of ckzss-like inte~aces for object frameworks from a descriptwn of the interaction between their participants.Our model builds on existing work on both formal (e.g.[Goguen, 1986], [Helm, 1990], [Miii, 1995]) and informal (see e.g.[Johnson,1992]) inter-object behavioral description techniques.We also describe a prototype '[framework browser" developed in Smalitaik, which we integrated into a toolkit for searching and browsing reusable ccwnponents.We conclude by discussing direciiorrsfor future research.