From Reuse Library Experiences to Application Generation Architectures
No Thumbnail Available
Date
1994-10-01T00:00:00Z
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Reuse through application generators has been successful in area of programming language systems. Can reuse practice in other domains benefit from these experiences? Companies usually start reuse at code level, by building a library with reusable code modules. As company's understanding of the domain and experience in reuse grow, reuse may also occur at design and requirement specification levels. We found that systematic modeling of commonalties and variations across systems makes it possible to convert experiences gained during component reuse into application generation solutions. Identifying common and variant structures in a domain is a core activity in building application generators. Domain modeling offers guidelines for representing and studying commonalties, but usually we do not study variations in any systematic way. Understanding variations comes with experience and, due to lack of guidelines and explicit representation, depends much on smartness of a software developer. We can, however, capture and study variations in the same way as we capture and study commonalties. We use a modeling notation that caters for variations. In the paper, we describe modeling methods and a framework that we use to progress from composition-based reuse to, more productive, application generators. The framework reflects our experiences gained in three projects on language processing systems that realized such a transition. We generalized the framework to make some of the concepts useful in the domain of business systems.