Engineering frameworks: a prerequisite for the design and implementation of distributed enterprise objects

Presents experiences made during the development of an application framework supporting the design, implementation and deployment of telecommunication services. This paper introduces the concepts of a TINA-C (Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture Consortium) compliant environment as an example for a framework in an enterprise-specific vertical application domain. The paper shows the necessity to define a supporting engineering framework including a set of related design patterns that allow one to design application frameworks in a technology-independent way. It presents the major concepts of a related middleware that has been designed as an ODP (Open Distributed Processing) compliant distributed processing environment and that has been implemented in a heterogeneous CORBA 2 (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) environment. The presented work is a part of the research and development program of GMD FOKUS and builds the core of the Y middleware