Customer Reviews

Domain-Specific Application Frameworks: Frameworks Experience by Industry

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This book provides the experience in developing software frameworks through 30 examples which contain an array of application domains, including: * Flexible manufacturing architectures * Computer integrated manufacturing * New generation control systems * Concurrent engineering * Reliable distributed computing * High-performance web servers * Multimedia telecommunications * Networking and telecommunications * Industrial visualization * And many others

It is directly from the leading organizations in software frameworks.

This book in conjunction with the books "Building Applicaton Frameworks: Object-Oriented Foundations of Framework Design" 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.

This 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.

I would like to congratulate the authors of three volumes on Building, Implementing and Domain specific application frameworks on an extremely well done job. I found the three volumes to be an invaluable and comprehensive source on application frameworks. These volumes cover all aspects pertaining to frameworks including models of development, key technical and business issues surrounding building of frameworks, experiences, lessons learned and successful practices to mention a few.

In my opinion the three volumes are a must read for any software engineer who has been using or developing frameworks and as essential for software designers who want to be introduced and train in this area. The building volume is in particular attractive as a textbook for an advanced course on application frameworks.

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 second volume applies the concepts and techniques developed in the first volume to a number of different application areas ranging from agent-based applications to AI frameworks to programming languages and tools. The enclosed CD-ROM allows the reader to examine example frameworks, including the code for individual frameworks. Animated demonstrations help in understanding both the individual frameworks as well as the overall approach.

Like the first volume, this volume will prove very useful to both academics and practitioners.

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.

An almost indispensable 3-volume reading to understand the success of framework technologies in today's software systems. The books include most of the top
articles on the subject, providing a thorough insight in both design and implementation issues regarding frameworks, also complemented with practical experience
about framework usage. Although the work is mainly concentrated on technical aspects, the articles are comprehensible enough to be taken as reference material by
a broad community, for example, software engineers, programmers, or technology managers. The books are useful for anybody planning to include
framework-based techniques in software development processes or planning to improve current object-oriented practices. It is also an excellent source for graduate
courses.

Volume 1 lays the fundamental concepts supporting object-oriented frameworks, and describes the problems and challenges that this
technology raises in software development. The book covers topics such as domain analysis, development concepts and approaches,
documentation, and management, among others. Of course, the compilation of articles makes some parts little redundant, but this is a minor detail compared with the
fruitful contributions made by the book. In particular, the articles on reusing hooks, hot-spot-driven development, composing modeling frameworks in Catalysis, and
composition problems, causes and solutions, are a sample of the outstanding level of this work. Each chapter adds at the end a number of related questions and
student projects aiming to reinforce concepts and promote further investigation. As a comment, novice readers should take the sections concerning hooks and
hot-spots carefully because these topics are presented in a slightly confusing way.

Volume 2 focuses on specific framework implementations, dealing with existing frameworks for different application domains, such as businesses, multi-agent
systems, languages and system software. In this book, the readers will find a level of detail much closer to specific implementations issues than in the previous
volume. Nonetheless, the writing style remains mostly clear and accessible for a quite broad audience. The case-studies and experience reports described by the
articles show an attractive industrial perspective of the framework approach, and more important, they go an step forward in the road of a more mature discipline for
software development. In addition, a
CD-Rom with concrete examples of these applications is included with the book.

Volume 3 completes this series with a number of domain-specific application frameworks developed by industry, showing how to apply the concepts and ideas of
the previous books in software products. In this line, it includes very interesting frameworks for manufacturing systems and distributed systems, among others. It also
goes through concrete software scenarios, illustrating the benefits of combining domain knowledge and object-orientation expertise. Although the level of the articles
is rather odd, the volume certainly provides the readers a realistic picture of the problems of building and adapting frameworks by learning from others' experience.
A CD-Rom is also included with this book.

Overall, these framework books collect the state-of-the-art on framework development, offering a comprehensive and
easy-to-understand guide for both academics and practitioners in the field. It is clear that framework technologies will not solve all the problems (perhaps they rise
more challenges than current approaches), however, taking advantage of the framework possibilities can make your development process more repeatable,
productive, and also less painful. The gains of this retrain are no doubt a good investment.

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.

Until know very few experience reports on framework development have been described. This book describes several framework development projects, providing a very good understanding of the current state of the art of the framework technology. It can be used as a guide for applying framework technology for different application domains, such as control systems, commercial applications, and so on. It may be used as a guide for industrial development projects or as a textbook for SE courses.

I was mainly interested in the MES implementation part and I found those chapters quite inspiring. We are usually lead by "common practices" which form our experience and we'll use them throughout our work. But formalizing and being able to communicate a technology is always an issue (unless you're going to di it all by yourself).
Excellent.

"Domain Specific..." is another excellent book from the "Fraemwork collection". It is a set comprehensive reference books as well as a authoritative textbooks by experts in this growing research field.

The description of practical experiences as well as more conceptual descriptions, are usefull to understand the complexity of achieving high levels of software reusability.

Managers and academics, will find a lot of material to help them decide if this is the way to go. Our research group in Web Engineering at the University of Sydney (weg.ee.usyd.edu.au) will us it extensively to improve our development practices.