Design, Distribution, and Management of Object Oriented Software

The promise of object-oriented software has been somewhat dimmed by the continuing need for source code familiarity to realize the goals of code-reuse and manageability. Software design has been hampered by the infeasibility of predicting all possible circumstances of use. Composing applications out of reusable components has remained a myth, primarily due to limitations of the simplistic shared library model. This paper proposes a three-pronged attack on these limitations of object-oriented software in the context of C++. A flexibility framework which facilitates the extension and modification of software without recompilations or source-code familiarity is described. Partially resolved loadable subclasses that may be distributed as reusable units for type-safe application composition. Specific programming guidelines which allow implementors to create software that may be fine-tuned at run-time according to application characteristics is described. Thus, the paper proposes a set of tools, techniques and guidelines that can facilitate the construction of application frameworks.