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A software framework is a reusable design for a software system (or subsystem). This is expressed as a set of abstract classes and the way their instances collaborate for a specific type of software (Johnson and Foote 1988; Deutsch 1989). All software frameworks are object-oriented designs. Although designs don't have to be implemented in an object-oriented language, they usually are. For example, a software framework can be geared toward building graphical editors for different domains like artistic drawing, music composition, and mechanical CAD (Vlissides and Linton 1990; Johnson 1992). Another software framework can help build compilers for different programming languages and target machines (Johnson, McConnell et al. 1992). Yet another might help build financial modeling applications (Birrer and Eggenschwiler 1993) or decision support systems (Gachet 2003). According to Pree (1994), software frameworks consists of frozen spots and hot spots. On the one hand, frozen spots define the overall architecture of a software system, that is to say its basic components and the relationships between them. These remain unchanged (frozen) in any instantiation of the application framework. On the other hand, hot spots represent those parts where the programmers using the framework add their own code to add the functionality specific to their own project. Software frameworks define the places in the architecture where adaptations for specific functionality should be made - the hot spots. In an object-oriented environment, a framework consists of abstract and concrete classes. Instantiation of such a framework consists of composing and subclassing the existing classes (Buschmann 1996). When developing a concrete software system with a software framework, the hot spots are specialized according to the specific needs and requirements of the system. Software frameworks rely on the Hollywood Principle: "Don’t call us, we’ll call you." (Larman 2002). This means that the user-defined classes (for example, new subclasses), receive messages from the predefined framework classes. These are usually handled by implementing superclass abstract methods. Having a good Framework in place allows the developers to spend more time concentrating on the business-specific problem at hand rather than on the plumbing code behind it. Also a Framework will limit the choices during development, so it increases productivity, specifically in big and complex systems.
Java (programming language)|Java and Java EE .NET Framework|.NET PHP PHP has at least 70 web frameworks. Python (programming language)|Python Python has at least 30 web frameworks. Ruby (programming language)|Ruby Platform-independent See also | ||||||||
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