Tool Support for Helping the Use of Frameworks

Frameworks promote design and code reuse, at a higher level of granularity. The use of frameworks is a hard task though, because usually they lack documentation and instructions on how to use them, thus being, in general, very difficult to understand. This paper addresses some mechanisms to help framework usage. It presents SEA-Preceptor, a hyperdocument based tool that sets up the possible paths to be followed by framework users to construct applications. SEA-Preceptor hyperdocuments also allow navigating through design or code of frameworks (or applications), as a way of helping on framework understanding. Frameworks and applications are specified in SEA environment (that hosts SEA-Preceptor and other tools) as sets of diagrammatic models that are views of a semantically checked metamodel repository, which is semi-automatically translated into source code.