The Framework Life Span: a Case Study for Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Frameworks are sets of reusable and customizable software components for specific application domains. The development of a framework usually follows a process, the framework life span, where the basic architectural elements, which are specific application independent, are designed first. These basic elements represent the stable parts of the framework and are used as “white box” components. When the framework becomes mature, an increasing number of concrete high level components are provided, which represent the variable parts of the framework and are reused as "black boxes". This chapter presents the G++ application framework for computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) and illustrates how its design is derived from the G++ pattern language, highlighting the relationships between application frameworks, patterns, and pattern languages.