Workshop on Language Support for Design Patterns and Frameworks (LSDF’97)

Abstract

There is growing interest in the role of languages in employing reusable OO architectures. In particular, OO frameworks and design patterns can be related to languages in various ways. More concretely, we recognise the following topics where languages, patterns and frameworks come together:

• Language support for design patterns: Design patterns are primarily used as a design technique and only limited attention is paid to their implementation. A number of researchers have investigated different ways of providing language support for design patterns, e.g. by representing them as language constructs or by template code generation. However, the issue is far from solved and should be investigated further.

• Framework instantiation languages: Lately, some authors have proposed the use of specific instantiation languages for frameworks. Especially black-box frameworks in well understood domains could benefit from such languages, since they simplify instantiation of the framework considerably. However, the actual design and implementation of such languages is not well understood and needs to be further investigated. Also, when composing frameworks for use in an application, the instantiation languages may conflict with each other.

• Framework extension support: A well-known problem with white-box frameworks is that they are difficult to extend. One may need quite detailed understanding of the implementation of framework classes in order to know how they should be subclassed.