Design, Distribution and Management of ObjectOriented Software.pdfVIP

Design, Distribution and Management of Object-Oriented Software Arindam Banerji, David L. Cohn, Dinesh C. Kulkarni Distributed Computing Research Lab University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 Technical Report 94-02 January 1994. Design, Distribution and Management of Object-Oriented Software Arindam Banerji, David Cohn, Dinesh Kulkarni Distributed Computing Research Laboratory University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 axb@cse.nd.edu Abstract The promise of object-oriented software has been somewhat dimmed by the continu- ing need for source code familiarity to realize the goals of code-reuse and manage- ability. Software design has been hampered by the infeasibility of predicting all possible circumstances of use. Composing applications out of reusable components has remained a myth, primarily due to limitations of the simplistic shared library model. This paper proposes a three-pronged attack on these limitations of object-ori- ented software in the context of C++. A flexibility framework which facilitates the extension and modification of software without recompilations or source-code famil- iarity is described. Partially resolved loadable subclasses that may be distributed as reusable units for type-safe application composition. Specific programming guide- lines which allow implementors to create software that may be fine-tuned at run-time according to application characteristics is described. Thus, the paper proposes a set of tools, techniques and gui