Reverse engineering framework reuse interfaces

Abstract

Object-oriented application frameworks provide an established way of reusing the design and implementation of applications in a specific domain. Using a framework for creating applications is not a trivial task, however, and special tools are needed for supporting the process. Tool support, in turn, requires explicit specification of the reuse interfaces of frameworks. Unfortunately these specifications typically become quite extensive and complex for non-trivial frameworks. In this paper we discuss the possibility to reverse engineer a reuse interface specification from a framework's and its example applications' source code. We also introduce a programming environment that supports both making and using such specifications. In our environment, the reuse interface modeling is supported by a concept analysis based reverse engineering technique described in this paper.