The METAFrame'95 Environment

1 The MetaFrameEnvironment MetaFrame is a meta-level framework designed to ooer a sophisticated support for the systematic and structured computer aided generation of application-speciic complex objects from collections of reusable components. Figure 1 shows its overall organization. Special care has been taken in the design of an adequate, almost natural-language speciication language, of a user-friendly graphical interface , of a hypertext based navigation tool, and a of semi-automatic synthesis process and repository management. This application-independent core is complemented by application-speciic libraries of components, which constitute the objects of the synthesis. The principle of separating the component implementation from its description is systematically enforced: for each application we have a distinct Meta-Data repository containing a logic view of the components. The tools themselves and their documentation are available in a diierent repository. This organization ooers a maximum of exibility since the synthesis core is independent of the direct physical availability of the tools (except for the execution, which is a diierent matter). MetaFrame constitutes a sophisticated programming environment for large to huge grain programs whose implementation is supported by the automatic, library-based synthesis of linear compositions of modules. More complex control structures glueing the linear portions together must be programmed by hand. Still, being able to synthesize linear program fragments drastically improves over other methods where only single components can be retrieved from the underlying repository. This is already true in cases where one is only interested in the functionality of single components, because our synthesis algorithm will automatically determine the required interfacing modules. Thus MetaFrame supports the rapid and reliable realization of eecient application speciic complex systems without sophisticated user interaction, making it an ideal means for a systematic investigation and construction of adequate implementations in a problem speciic scenario. The MetaFrame approach abstracts from implementational details by allowing designers a high-level-development of the tools. Speciications express constraints in a temporal logic that uniformly and elegantly captures an abstract view of the repository. Implementations are in a high-level language tailored to express the combination of reusable analysis, veriication and transformation components stored in the repository, which are considered as atomic on this level.