Software Engineering, 10th Edition

15.2 Application frameworks

Early enthusiasts for object-oriented development suggested that one of the key benefits of using an object-oriented approach was that objects could be reused in different systems. However, experience has shown that objects are often too fine-grained and are often specialized for a particular application. It often takes longer to understand and adapt the object than to reimplement it. It has now become clear that object-oriented reuse is best supported in an object-oriented development process through larger-grain abstractions called frameworks.

As the name suggests, a framework is a generic structure that is extended to create a more specific subsystem or application. Schmidt et al. (Schmidt et al. 2004) define a ...