A process for construction and instantiation of frameworks based on a domain-specific pattern language.

Author(s)

Rosana Teresinha Vaccare Braga

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Carlos.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação (ICMC/SB)
• Defense date: 2003-02-14

Examining board members

Paulo Cesar Masiero; Fabio Kon; Jose Carlos Maldonado; Cecilia Mary Fischer Rubira; Claudia Maria Lima Werner

• Advisor: Paulo Cesar Masiero

Abstract

Patterns, pattern languages, and frameworks are ways of enhancing software reuse. The complexity of software frameworks, caused both by the difficulty to build and to use them, is one of the inhibitors of this technology. A process to ease the construction and instantiation of frameworks is presented, in which a pattern language is used to support the whole process, starting from the identification of the framework functionality, its design, implementation, validation, and its instantiation to domain-specific systems. The framework that results from applying the proposed process is white-box and its instantiation is done by specializing its abstract classes according to a specific system. The process includes the construction of a tool to automate the framework instantiation, through which it is possible to obtain a specific system only by supplying information about the language patterns used to model it. The proposed process is illustrated with the Pattern Language for Business Resource Management (GRN), which was used as the basis for the GREN framework construction. The GREN-Wizard is also presented, which is a tool to automatically instantiate the GREN framework to specific applications in the GRN domain. The proposed process is evaluated by a few experiments and several uses of the sub-processes that compose the general process, using GRN, GREN and the GREN-Wizard. (AU)