Finding and documenting the specialization interface of an application framework

This paper presents an approach to find, specify and use the specialization interface of an object-oriented framework as a set of framework-specific patterns. The approach is based on the assumption that the user tries to reuse a framework by setting meaningful goals in the context of their application and then achieves the goals by performing a sequence of programming tasks. The goals can be refined as informal specialization patterns, which are framework-specific descriptions on how to reach a particular specialization goal. Furthermore, the obtained specialization patterns can be transformed into more precise specifications to enable tool support. As a result, the framework user can use both a cookbook-like informal documentation and supporting tools to specialize the framework. Copyright c © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.