Building Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Foundations of Framework Design

The three volumes address the needs both of the business and of the research. They suggest practical solutions to recurrent development problems and point out hot research topics.

In particular, Volume 1 "Building Application Frameworks" highlights the difficulties and draws the path towards the successful development of effective application frameworks. Each chapter has a final section with review questions and project proposals, which helps teachers and students to better assess the mastery of new concepts.

Volume 2 "Implementing Application Frameworks" comprises a number of case studies that exemplify how to develop complex frameworks by exploiting the synergy of advanced techniques and methodologies, such as design patterns, architectural styles, software components, multi-agent systems, and more.

Volume 3 "Domain-Specific Application Frameworks" emphasises the best practice in software development and reuse for a variety of application domains.

Volumes 2 and 3 include two CD-ROMs with case studies, sample models, framework code, and demos.


Excellent books to learn how to develop OOA Frameworks   February 26, 2002
Monica Pinto (Malaga, SPAIN)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful

This book in conjunction with the books "Domain-Specific Application Frameworks: Frameworks Experience by Industry" and "Implementing Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Frameworks at Work" are a series of three books that constitute a complete and necessary guide for the design and implementation of application frameworks. They are based on multiple academic and industrial contributors experience building a wide range of domain-specific application framework. These books are very easy to read and understand and you can learn from them not only what a framework and an application framework are, but also how to apply this technology to real world domains, like manufacturing, health care, distributed computing, real-time systems, simulation environments, ...

First book, "Building Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Foundations of Framework Design" introduces application frameworks, their benefits and problems. It addresses all the fundamental concepts behind OO application frameworks and provides guidelines for OO application framework development. It is organized in eight parts. Part one provides a complete overview of OO application framework technology describing what is an application framework, what are the problems and benefits of application frameworks and how to use, develop and evaluate an application framework. Part Two presents some historical application frameworks and discusses some general guidelines to increase the reusability of application frameworks. Part Three describes how to build a framework analysing a concrete domain. The rest of the book provides all the necessary information to completely build an application framework. It presents all the concepts managed in framework development, which are the different development approaches, how to test the resulting frameworks, the problems derived from integration and a question sometimes forgotten but very important, the framework documentation.

Second book, "Domain-Specific Application Frameworks: Frameworks Experience by Industry" is focused in the experience of industrial and academic contributors in the development of OO application framework in different domains. Each chapter covers step by step the complete development of an application framework in manufacturing, distributed systems, real-time systems, telecommunication, multimedia, chemistry and data visualization domains. It includes the motivation developers founded to choose application framework technology, the problems they had to solve and the final solutions they developed.

Third book, "Implementing Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Frameworks at Work", shows step by step how to implement application frameworks in different domains. It is organized in six parts covering examples about i) Business Frameworks with different examples in sales and administrative domains, ii) Artificial Intelligence, iii) Agent Application Frameworks, presenting interesting frameworks for speech recognition, neural networks and agents. iv) Specialized tool frameworks, v) Language Specific Frameworks, vi) System Application Frameworks, which present and analyse the application of OO frameworks in combination with other methodologies as component-oriented programming, language constructs or constraint programming and vi) Experiences in Application Frameworks. This last section is very useful because analyse the lessons learned using the application framework technology.


Money well invested   December 4, 1999
Dr. Hossein Saiedian
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

The ``Application Framework'' series (building, implementing, and domain-specific applications) are truly excellent experienced-based guide on building and implementing object-oriented (OO) frameworks. Each book in the series is a gold mine; excellent examples of successful implementation at corporations from all around the world are provided. The examples practically walk one thru all steps of developing and implementing a framework. The series provides numerous invaluable technical as well as managerial tips. This is a very unique practical series and most essential for those who want to be successful in enterprise software development in 21st century.

The authors/editors are well-known experts in the OO arena and that sure adds to the credibility and value of the series.

I'd recommend all three books to practitioners and consultants. It is a money well invested. I also recommended the first book for a graduate course in object-oriented development. ~


An outstanding collection of work - essential reading!   October 11, 1999
David Hamu (dhamu@ix.netcom.com) (Phoenix, Arizona, USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

Building Application Frameworks is an essential reference for anyone involved in moderate to large scale software development. Application Frameworks are an important consideration for anyone involved in software engineering today.

Software teams have been building application frameworks from the beginning. However, the process is still very complex. This book provides a variety of experience and research perspectives which demonstrate the right way to go about application framework design and development. The book also provides generous examples of the pitfalls which jeopardize any software development activity and how those risks can be avoided.


A handbook for building and documenting frameworks   November 19, 1999
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Everybody speaks about frameworks but few of them really know how to build a successful framework. This book serves as a very useful guide for building and documenting frameworks. Especially you can find information about how to find a suitable framework for a specific application, how to understand its architecture and how to adapt it to your particular requirements.