Technique for documenting the framework of an object-oriented system

This paper presents techniques for documenting the design of frameworks for object-oriented systems and applies the approach to the design of a configurable message passing system. The technique decomposes a framework into six concerns: the class hierarchy, protocols, control flow, synchronization, entity relationships and configurations of the system. An abstract description of each concern is specified using standard notations. Subtyping is used to ensure that the abstract specifications apply to the abstract classes, concrete classes, and instances of the system. The message passing framework we document with these techniques is general, portable, and efficient. It supports parallel message based applications on both tightly coupled shared memory architectures and loosely coupled distributed memory architectures. The message passing system framework has been coded in C++, runs on the Choices operating system, and has been benchmarked on a system of Encore Multimax 320 tightly-coupled multiprocessors. The system is being implemented on a network of SUN SPARCstation 2s.