Framework-Based Software Development Environments

当前的软件开发环境往往处于一个范围的两端：一端是专门的应用程序生成器；另一种是通用编程环境。前者为系统开发和重用提供了强有力的支持，但是构建成本很高，并且只能用于有限的领域。后者提供了微弱的支持，但通常是可用的和普遍适用的。本研究探索了一种自动化生产介于这两个极端之间的特定于应用程序的环境的方法。关键思想是，一个软件框架封装了一组系统中的共性，可以通过结构化转换过程将其合并到现有的通用编程环境中。具体地说，这个项目是开发一个系统，该系统允许环境实现者专门化现有的编程环境来处理应用程序家族。该系统提供了一组形式运算符，用于扩充环境的形式描述；在应用操作符时，系统半自动地构建一组转换规则，这些规则可用于将特定应用程序转换为原始环境的程序。系统的输出是一个特定于应用程序的环境以及一个程序转换器，该程序转换器为在该环境中编写的程序提供执行语义。

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.