- Application framework
In
computer programming , an application framework is asoftware framework that is used to implement the standard structure of an application for a specificoperating system . Application frameworks became popular with the rise of the graphical user interface (GUI), since these tended to promote a standard structure for applications. It is also much simpler to create automatic GUI creation tools when a standard framework is used, since the underlying code structure of the application is known in advance.Object-oriented programming techniques are usually used to implement frameworks such that the unique parts of an application can simply inherit from pre-existing classes in the framework.Fact|date=April 2007One of the first commercial application frameworks was
MacApp , written byApple Computer for the Macintosh. Originally written in an extended (object-oriented) version of Pascal, it was later rewritten inC++ . Other popular frameworks for the Mac includeMetrowerks Powerplant andMacZoop (all based on Carbon). A different approach to an application framework is Cocoa forMac OS X .Free software frameworks exist as part of the Mozilla,OpenOffice.org ,GNOME andKDE projects.Microsoft created a similar product for Windows called the Microsoft Foundation Classes or MFC.There are also a number of frameworks which will create identical applications for
Linux , Macintosh, and Windows from the same source code, such as thewidget toolkit swxWidgets orFOX toolkit .ee also
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Software framework
*Widget toolkit External links
* [http://www.scorpus.com RAS metadata repository based framework for reusable software assets ]
* [http://www.devexpress.com/xaf/ XAF application framework from DevExpress]
* [http://www.mxframe.net MX-Frame Business Application Framework]
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