UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

A Survey of Frameworks

Juha Hautamäki

Department of Computer Science, University of Tampere
Report A-1997-3
March 1997
37 pages

Abstract

A framework is a tool to improve the software developing process. It is a reusable design expressed as a set of abstract classes and the way their instances collaborate. With frameworks, application developers don't have to start from scratch each time they write an application. Instead they specialize framework's behavior to suit the current problem by extending and refining its classes and operations. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of frameworks as well as tools and methods supporting their use and design. This paper is one of the preliminary reports of the FRED (Framework Editor for Java) project.

Keywords: Object-Oriented Frameworks, Design Patterns, Software Engineering