XML implementation of frame processor

Abstract

A quantitative study has shown that frame technology [1] supported by Fusion™ toolset can lead to reduction in time-to-market (70%) and project costs (84%). Frame technology has been developed to handle large COBOL-based business software product families. We wished to investigate how the principle of frame approach can be applied to support product families in other application domains, in particular to build distributed component-based systems written in Object-Oriented languages. As Fusion™ is tightly coupled with COBOL, we implemented our own tools based on frame concepts using the XML technology. In our solution, a generic architecture for a product family is a hierarchy of XML documents. Each such document contains a reusable program fragment instrumented for change with XML tags. We use a tool built on top of XML parsing framework JAXP to process documents in order to produce a custom member of a product family. Our solution is cost-effective and extensible. In the paper, we describe our solution, illustrating its use with examples. We intend to make our solution available to public in order to encourage investigation of frame concepts in other application domains, implementation languages and platforms.