An Integrated Approach for Documenting, Exploring, and Building Framework-Based Software

Well-designed class libraries and frameworks are key elements of object-oriented software development. However, while frameworks may significantly reduce development time and cost, they are hard to learn and understand. We present an environment that supports documentation, browsing and editing of selected aspects of frameworks and framework-based applications on an abstraction level that is not directly extractable from source code. The main ideas of this environment are a specialized desktop metaphor for visualizing and browsing software architectures, the support of framework-based development by means of architecture templates, and an open tool architecture that supports the integration of arbitrary tools for visualizing and editing application and framework parts.