Introduction to Application Frameworks - A History of Application Frameworks
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The concept of the application framework is not new, and various types of frameworks have been around for a couple of decades. The first widely used framework was the Model-View Controller (MVC), a Smalltalk user interface framework developed by Xerox. The approach of MVC, which depends on the Observer design pattern, has been adapted in many user interface systems. In addition to the Smalltalk MVC, other user-interface frameworks have emerged to assist in the development of applications running under several operating systems. Some of the well-known user-interface frameworks are MacApp and MFC, which assist in application development on Macintosh and Windows systems, respectively.
Although the concept of a framework has been widely adopted in user-interface development, it is not limited to the user-interface framework. The framework concept is also used in generic application development. Taligent, a company that develops object-oriented operating systems, alerted the software industry to the possibilities of the framework concept. Taligent was formed in 1992 as a result of collaboration between IBM and Apple to create new operating systems that would run on any hardware platform. However, as time went by, the industry became less interested in such new operating systems. Taligent shifted its focus to developing framework layers that sit on top of existing operating systems. CommonPoint, a framework developed by Taligent, aims to reduce application development effort by providing developers with a comprehensive programming environment, similar to what Sun’s Java environment offers today through its Java language and runtime virtual machine.
Sun’s Java environment and Microsoft’s .NET environment provide their own frameworks along with the new languages and virtual machines. Those who work with Java or .NET can fully appreciate the benefits what those two frameworks have offered to application development in the past several years. Java and .NET are both frameworks that target all types of applications, and thus such frameworks must not contain any business-domain–related classes and designs. However, there exist frameworks that sit on top of such generic frameworks and provide services and expertise for certain specific business domains, such as supply chain systems and financial applications.
IBM (which later bought Taligent) also developed its own business-domain–orientated framework, called the San Francisco Project. San Francisco was developed using Java, and it consists of the application frameworks for various business domains, such as order management, warehouse management, and general ledger management. Unlike general-purpose frameworks such as Java and .NET, the San Francisco framework is designed especially for specific business domains.
 This chapter is from Developing Application Frameworks in .NET by Xin Chen (Apress, 2004, ISBN: 1590592883). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today. Buy this book now.
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