Composing reusable software components through views

The ability to combine separate reusable software components to form a complete program is necessary for effective software reuse. Views provide a clean, flexible, and efficient mechanism for combining reusable software components. A view describes how an application data type implements features of an abstract type; it provides a bidirectional mapping between a generic concept and a particular implementation of that concept. Parameterizing a generic procedure by means of views allows a single copy of the procedure to be specialized for a variety of application data types and target languages. Both composition of views and multiple views of the same data as different abstract types are often required. Automated support makes it easy to create views and to generate specialized code for an application in a desired target language. These techniques have been implemented. Examples are presented that illustrate combination of components through views to specialize a generic procedure and to instantiate a software framework.<>