Abstract. This paper is about a paradigm shift from the current practice of manually searching for and adapting components and their manual assembly to Generative Programming, which is the automatic selection and assembly of components on demand. First, we argue that the current OO technology does not support reuse and configurability in an effective way. Then we show how a system family approach can aid in defining reusable components. Finally, we describe how to automate the assembly of components based on configuration knowledge. We compare this paradigm shift to the introduction of interchangeable parts and automated assembly lines in the automobile industry.We also illustrate the steps necessary to develop a product line using a simple example of a car product line. We present the feature model of the product line, develop a layered architecture for it, and automate the assembly of the components using a generator. We also discuss some design issues, applicability of the approach, and future development.

This paper presents a taxonomy for open hypermedia systems. The purpose of the Flag 1 taxonomy is manifold: 1 to provide a framework to classify and concisely describe individual systems, 2 to characterize what an open hypermedia system is, 3 to provide a framework for comparing di erent systems in a system independent way, and 4 to provide an overview of the design space of open hypermedia systems. The Flag taxonomy builds on the achievements of the Dexter model. It extends the terminology of the Dexter model to adequately cover issues that relate to open hypermedia systems such a s i n tegration and use of thirdparty applications to edit and display h ypermedia components. Two of the most prominent o p e n h ypermedia systems, DeVise Hypermedia and Microcosm, are used as case studies. The Flag taxonomy i s used to compare these systems on a carefully selected set of aspects that distinguish open hypermedia systems from other hypermedia systems.

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Association is an important relationship that is supported in both UML and entity relationship database modeling tools. However, there is no language or library support in current object-oriented languages for implementing an association relationship. Instead, a complex implementation using references or collections of references must be handcrafted and laboriously maintained each time an association relationship is needed. In this paper, we develop an approach to supporting the association relationship through the design of a reusable class library that hides most of the complexity and guarantees that the consistency of the relationship is maintained automatically. Our current library implementation in C# draws on generic types with runtime type instantiation, runtime reflection on type parameters, annotations on classes, and runtime code generation. This set of language features seems to be necessary to provide effective support for association relationships.