Abstract

Object-oriented frameworks have almost completely dominated the world of business applications. Frameworks are widely considered to be helpful and are designed to speed up creation of applications. However, when trying to apply a framework for a particular application, it often turns out that this is not as easy as it seemed at the beginning. It takes time to become familiar with the framework, with its concepts and the standard way of use. Afterwards it often appears that the standard way of using the framework, provided by the authors, do not fully fit for the application. Developers try to match a solution to the existing structure and behavior of the framework. If business requirements to the application are higher than capabilities provided by the framework, The developers try to match the existing framework to save the application. This is what can be called “framework hell”. Time is running out, and eventually one may find that the chosen framework should not ever be used in the current application despite the initial similarities to the application requirements. This paper presents a brief analysis of the main problems with the adjustment and reuse of frameworks. The analysis results from three years of the author's experience in framework reuse, particularly with frameworks supporting generation of applications based on Web services in ASP.NET technology. However, the author’s experience can be extended to other frameworks, as it results in a number of guidelines to be followed by framework developers to enable other developers to use frameworks in non-standard applications.

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