ROLE-MODEL BASED FRAMEWORK DESIGN AND INTEGRATION

Today, any large object-oriented software system is built using framew orks. Yet, designing frameworks and defining their interaction with cl ients remains a difficult task. A primacy reason is that today's domin ant modeling concept, the class, is not well suited to describe the co mplexity of object collaborations as it emerges in framework design an d integration. We use role modeling to overcome the problems and limit ations of class-based modeling. Using role models, the design of a fra mework and its use by clients can be described succinctly and with muc h better separation of concerns than with classes. Using role objects, frameworks can be integrated into use-contexts that have not been for eseen by their original designers.