Abstract
The paper presents the experiences made during the development of an application framework supporting the design, implementation and deployment of telecommunication services. It introduces the concepts of a TINA-C-compliant (Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture Consortium) environment as an example for a framework in an enterprise specific, vertical application domain. The paper shows the advantages of the definition of a supporting engineering framework including a set of related design patterns that allow 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-compliant (Open Distributed Processing) 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.