Fred & JavaFrames

(This site is not affiliated in any way with FRED(tm) business and development software suite from Selections & Functions Inc. If you are looking for it, go to www.framework.com)

Introduction

Software development is largely based on standards, conventions, underlying systems and architectures, most notably object-oriented frameworks. However, implementing application-specific code conforming to architectural rules and conventions can be tedious. In the Fred project we developed a research prototype of a generic architecture-oriented development environment for Java. The Fred tool took the specialization interface of a framework as a set of specialization patterns and provided interactive task-based programming assistance to use the framework. Incorporating adaptive code generation and documentation, the tool effectively demonstrated our methodology to adopt as well as systematically specialize a framework or reuse architectural standard such as Java Beans.

JavaFrames was a follow-up project of Fred, aiming to further develop the Fred concept and evaluate it in industry. During the project, the pattern-based tool support was integrated in the Eclipse environment and evaluated with case studies. The JavaFrames tool can be downloaded here.

Partners

The Fred/JavaFrames methodology and tools were developed in a joint research project between University of Tampere, Tampere University of Technology, and University of Helsinki. The projects were funded by the National Technology Agency of Finland (TEKES) and by several software companies (see timeline).