Customer Reviews

Implementing Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Frameworks at Work

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This book presents more than 25 case studies in framework development. The approaches are varied. Some are very nuts&bolts, others operate at a much more philosophical level. Some of the more interesting topics involve component-based systems, hardware design, and several applications of design patterns.

The whole thing, including 50 pages of end matter, weighs in over 700 pages. The writing is dense and packed with data. It's a real goldmine of information.

The problem is that a goldmine, these days, typically yields one gram of gold per tonne of ore. Extracting this book's information, the real usable content, from its data is about like extracting that gram. Maybe that's appropriate, though. Framework development is not as well understood as lots of other kinds of software, and the first step in any science is to collect specimens. I've found my nuggets in this book, as other readers have found theirs, but different people find different nuggets according to their needs and interests.

If you have an active interest in framework development, and if you have time and energy to distill over 650 pages of raw data on your own, this book may be for you. It really is not for the beginner or the casual reader, though.

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.

Most of the reviewers so far are either students or young academics and collaborators of Mohamed Fayad who were specifically asked to provide excellent reviews on this book. I would like to hear the comments by someone else for a change.

This book in conjunction with the books Building Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Foundations of Framework Design and "Domain-Specific Application Frameworks: Frameworks Experience by Industry" 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.

This 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.

Focusing primarily on business systems and agent-based application frameworks, it covers also programming languages and tools. You can find practical results and evaluation from expert framework builders.

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 helps you to reduce the cost of framework development by providing 40 case studies, documenting the experiences framework builders and users at major corporations and research labs, world-wide. Throughout, the authors extract important lessons and highlight technical and organizational implementation practices that have been proven to yield the biggest pay off.

This is why I choose this book.

The authors and contributors have provided an excellent collection of experiences for implementing application frameworks to solve real-world problems. I highly recommend this volume.

I was quite impressed by the book as it spans a wide range of academic and industrial issues. As a matter of fact, I recommend Dr. Fayad's publications to my graduate students as well to professionals. His writing is clear, concise, inspiring and evocative.

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 third volume presents a number of major case studies each reporting a framework implementation or an application development. The thirty examples in this volume cover a number of important domains such as flexible manufacturing architectures, new generation control systems, concurrent engineering, multimedia telecommunications, etc. An enclosed CD-ROM allows the reader to examine many of these frameworks and applications in complete detail.

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