Building Industrial CHIP Applications from Reusable Software Components

In this paper we present results on the systematic reuse of components in a number of large scale applications. The applications have been developed in CHIP, a Prolog based constraint logic programming system. We show that even though the applications solve very different problems, we can reuse large parts of the data model and graphical user interfaces. We describe several very high level components for the handling of textual information in lists, Gantt charts and diagrams. Together with an abstract data model these components significantly decrease development effort required for end-user applications and simplify the extension of existing programs.