Storage and management of object-oriented frameworks

Significant gains in programmer productivity have been achieved through the use of object-oriented frameworks that support reuse of the knowledge from application analysis, design and developments. There has been a great deal of work on building object-oriented frameworks in various application domains. However, little attention has been paid to store and manage frameworks. This paper describes on-going work to develop a framework repository which stores and manages reusable object-oriented frameworks. Key elements and their properties needed to manage frameworks are identified. From the complex nature of framework information structure, integration of retrieval and browsing as a means of accessing information is described also. In addition, the layered architecture for a framework repository is suggested which supports management of diverse granularity of reuse information.