Tool Support for Class Library Reuse

OO-CaRE is a classification and retrieval tool to support reuse of class libraries. The tool is based on the faceted classification method where a component is classified using a collection of terms belonging to different facets. The tool provides a retrieval mechanism which returns the set of matching classes and their "closeness" to the the given query. The priority of a facet (signifying its importance) can be dynamically set by the reuser thus providing additional flexibility in the formulation of queries. The tool is built in the Eiffel environment using Eiffel class libraries. 1 Introduction Software reuse still remains an exception rather than a rule despite the simplicity of the idea and its attractive benefits [Boehm 87, Brooks 87]. Reuse in the traditional software development paradigms has had various levels of successes and failures [Sajeev 95]. In recent years however, object-orientation (OO) has given a new hope for solving the problems on the road to software reuse. It ..

Reusability Analysis of Four Standard Object-Oriented Class Libraries

Class libraries play a key role in object-oriented paradigm. They provide, by and large, the most commonly reused components in object-oriented environments. In this paper, we use a number of metrics to study reusability of four standard class libraries of two object-oriented languages; namely Java and Eiffel. The purpose of the study is to demonstrate how different design philosophies of the two languages have affected structural design and organization of their standard libraries that in turn might have affected their reusability with regards to Ease of Reuse and Design with Reuse. Our study concludes that within limits of our measurements, the Java libraries are easy to reuse whereas Eiffel libraries are better designed with reuse. We observe that whilst design with reuse may make class libraries extensible and maintainable, but it does not necessarily make them easy to reuse