Customer Reviews

Building Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Foundations of Framework Design

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For one that works on frameworks and tools almost every day, I'm one that understands the production of frameworks and the OO methodology very well - however I got this book on a recommendation for its rich content and ideas, but I was left dissappointed.

First of all, the book is more of an academic book. I have no problem with this as the Design Patterns book produced by the GoF was written in the same manner, but the language and tone could have more informal to make it a more enjoyable read for the working architect rather than the university student.

That not really being the real issue, there are many chapters in this book that are almost useless to read. I understand this book shouldn't be read from cover-to-cover (seeing as the chapters have hardly any real order to them - another bad point), but reading about a smalltalk framework for something so trivial and talking about it's significance for a hundred pages or so doesn't make me learn anything - simular to the Mythical Man Month. I'm sure these kinds of chapters or books even are an important, integral part of computer science and should be captured, but this isn't the book I'm afraid.

The chapters on example frameworks, although helpful, didn't tell the reader a lot of inforamtion. For instance, the Hypermedia framework was written as it was being told with an overview. Although the patterns and some driving design decisions were made, the actual purpose of the framework was unclear until the end of the chapter that I put in the missing pieces myself. The author wrote it like a review or an abstract to a larger case study - which doesn't help those that truly want to understand what's going on.

The chapters on formalizing and understanding frameworks, although I appreiciate the academic effort to describing frameworks, were useless reads as well. As an architect that has built many frameworks and continues to do so, their so-called "simplified model" couldn't even potentially describe half the frameworks i've built. For a book that is supposed to be the "definitive guide/reference" on frameworks, it most surely doesn't meet to the level of frameworks being produced in the enterprise today. Perhaps volumes 2 and 3 can clear this up.

Given all this, however, the book has some good chapters, albeit reviews and abstracts of white papers and other books. If you really want to start building frameworks, maybe this would be a good start, but I'd recommend Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Software, Refactoring, EJB Design Patterns and many other books about advanced OO and designing software that focus on the "smaller" elements of producing frameworks instead. If you truely understand these works, learning how to build frameworks is almost trivial and you won't really need to read this book. Maybe I'm just smart too, I dunno - you decide.

Just my thoughts - hope that helps someone's buying decision.

This three volume set distils the experience of a number of software practitioners, project managers, application engineers, researchers, and academics in dealing with framework-based software development. It offers a comprehensive and accessible treatment of the theory and practice of building and using application frameworks.

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.

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.

This is not reference material on how to build a proper framework. The book could have been a lot thinner if all the repetitions would have been eliminated. It's also sometimes hard to figure out what the authors are getting at exactly. A lot of stuff is simply common sense combined with knowledge of the proper usage of design patterns. They make a lot of fuss about 'hook methods' and 'template methods', even though I can't see what's so special about them. It's nice to have this book since material on frameworks is pretty rare. It would have been nicer though if it wouldn't have been so chaotic and cluttered.

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.

The object-oriented framework approach promises to dramatically reduce the cost of building new OO applications. But building a framework that can serve as the underlying skeleton for a group of applications is a demanding task; and once a framework has been built, generating a new application by specializing it appropriately, also requires considerable expertise. This three-volume collection edited by Fayad, Johnson, and Schmidt fills a long-standing gap in the OO literature by covering all aspects of frameworks.

This first volume lays the foundation for the framework approach. The first two parts of this volume provide an overview and general perspective of the framework approach. Next, it goes into the details of framework design and development, before moving on to testing, integration, and documentation. The final part of the book focuses on management issues and economic considerations. Each part consists of a number of chapters written by leading experts in the relevant topics.

This volume provides complete coverage of the foundations of the framework approach. Extremely useful for both academics and practitioners. The numerous problems and suggestions for projects at the end of each chapter also makes it very suitable as a text for advanced students.

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.

Object-oriented frameworks, reusable semi-finished software architectures, have made documented improvements on both software quality and reuseability. This three-volume set of books is an absolute neccessity for those who want to be at the cutting-edge of successfull software development.

This book provides you the solid foundation of building OO application frameworks in covering the concepts of software frameworks, understanding of software frameworks from the top names in the OO design and implementation world, techniques of developing, maintaining, and evaluating frameworks.

This is absolutely an essential book in software frameworks.

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. ~