Reusability and Tailorability in the Mjølner BETA System

Abstract

Reusability and tailorability in software development are discussed in general and a set of techniques supporting these concepts are described. An important concept that can give a high degree of reusability as well as tailorability is generality. Object-oriented languages give good support for expressing generality. The techniques discussed in this paper have been developed during the construction of the Mjølner BETA System. Some of them are of general (language independent) character but a great part of the flexibility in the system is due to the BETA programming language. An exception handling technique is presented as a special kind of tailoring. A general communication model supporting integration and tailorability of software components is presented.