Documentation and Building Support for Framework-based Software

Most tools for object-oriented software development provide extensive support for source code engineering but lack tools for visualizing and manipulating the architecture of an application on a higher level of abstraction. We are working on an environment that supports browsing and editing of certain aspects of an application's architecture on an abstraction level which is not that is not available through static or dynamic program analysis. Our approach is based on a specialized desktop metaphor in combination with hyperlinks for visualizing the structure of applications or frameworks. One of the ideas is to especially support software development that is based on predefined semi-finished software architectures (i.e., frameworks) by enabling the definition and reuse of architecture templates. A first experimental version of the environment has been implemented on the basis of the Combo framework. The latest version of the environment has been reimplemented in Java.