Design, Distribution and Management of Object-Oriented Software
Arindam Banerji, David Cohn, Dinesh Kulkarni
Distributed Computing Research Laboratory
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
axb@cse.nd.edu
Abstract
The promise of object-oriented software has been somewhat dimmed by
the continu- ing need for source code familiarity to realize the goals
of code-reuse and manage- ability. Software design has been hampered
by the infeasibility of predicting all possible circumstances of
use. Composing applications out of reusable components has remained a
myth, primarily due to limitations of the simplistic shared library
model. This paper proposes a three-pronged attack on these limitations
of object-ori- ented software in the context of C++. A flexibility
framework which facilitates the extension and modification of software
without recompilations or source-code familiarity is described.
Partially resolved loadable subclasses that may be distributed as
reusable units for type-safe application composition. Specific
programming guide- lines which allow implementors to create software
that may be fine-tuned at run-time according to application
characteristics is described. Thus, the paper proposes a set of tools,
techniques and guidelines that can facilitate the construction of
application frameworks.
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