Design Principles for Reusable, Composable and extensible Frameworks

Frameworks have been used since the early eighties. Now that frameworks are becoming increasingly popular, several problems are surfacing. Those problems can be categorized into evolution problems (i.e. problems with changes over time) and composition problems (i.e. problems that occur when more than one framework is used in an application). This master thesis focusses on preventing these problems in an early stage in the development of a framework. Guidelines for building OO Frameworks are presented and the guidelines are tried out in the domain of communication protocols