Object-oriented application frameworks provide an established way of reusing the design and implementation of applications in a specific domain. Using a framework for creating applications is not a trivial task, however, and special tools are needed for supporting the process. Tool support, in turn, requires explicit specification of the reuse interfaces of frameworks. Unfortunately these specifications typically become quite extensive and complex for non-trivial frameworks. In this paper we discuss the possibility to reverse engineer a reuse interface specification from a framework's and its example applications' source code. We also introduce a programming environment that supports both making and using such specifications. In our environment, the reuse interface modeling is supported by a concept analysis based reverse engineering technique described in this paper.

An application framework is a collection of classes implementing the shared architecture of a family of applications. It is shown how the specialization interface ("hot spots") of a framework can be annotated with specialization patterns to provide task-based guidance for the framework specialization process. The specialization patterns define various structural, semantic, and coding constraints over the applications derived from the framework. We also present a tool that supports both the framework development process and the framework specialization process, based on the notion of specialization patterns. We outline the basic concepts of the tool and discuss techniques to identify and specify specialization patterns as required by the tool. These techniques have been applied in realistic case studies for creating programming environments for application frameworks.