Framework-Based Software Development Environments

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Current software development environments tend to lie at opposite ends of a spectrum: at one extreme are specialized application generators; at the other are general purpose programming environments. The former provide strong support for system development and reuse, but are costly to build and available only for limited domains. The latter provide weak support, but are generally available and universally applicable. This research explores a way to automate the production of application-specific environments that lie between these two extremes. The key idea is that a software framework encapsulating the commonalities in a family of systems can be incorporated into an existing general purpose programming environment by a process of structured transformation. Specifically, this project is to develop a system that allows an environment implementor to specialize existing programming environments to handle families of applications. The system provides a set of formal operators for augmenting a formal description of an environment; as operators are applied, the system semi-automatically builds a set of transformation rules that can be used to translate application-specific programs into those of the original environment. The output of the system is an application- specific environment together with a program transformer that provides execution semantics for programs written in that environment.