Reuse in the application layer

• Authors: Hirotomo Okuno;Hideki Matsumoto;Hironori Asai;Mikiko Sakurai;Takao Nakayama
• Venue: CASCON '96 Proceedings of the 1996 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
• Year: 1996

Today's advanced CASE tools, combining the building-block and generative approaches to software reuse, are effective for reuse of software components and procedures in the presentation layer and data layer of the three-layer model. There are no effective tools generally available, however, for reuse of application-layer components and procedures, which are usually too numerous and small for efficient reuse. Programmers therefore choose to transform existing specification sheets of the application layer manually with a 4GL, rather than actually reusing them.TableSpec [12] is a tool that generates source code automatically from free-format table specifications, and facilitates the reuse of application logic specifications in tables of the form and structure commonly used in business transactions and corporate operations. Such tables are themselves an expression of logical constructs and procedures, and specifications written in this form are familiar and readily understandable to the client or user.With TableSpec, the tables can take the place of large parts of conventionally written specifications. They can be readily reused for automatic source code generation, for the development of other components of the same application software, for later revisions of that software, or for development of software for a different user or application. The large size of these components and their automatic source code generation have been found to result in efficient software development, customization, and reuse.