Patterns for understanding frameworks

Learning and understanding a framework is usually a major obstacle to its effective reuse. Before being able to use a framework successfully, users often go through a steep learning curve by spending a lot of effort understanding its underlying architecture and design principles. This is mainly due to users having to understand not only single isolated classes, but also complex designs of several classes whose instances collaborate for many different purposes, and using many different mechanisms. In addition, frameworks are also full of delocalized plans, and use inheritance and delegation intensively, which makes their design more difficult to grasp. How to obtain the necessary information from the framework itself and its accompanying documentation is the main problem with framework understanding. Considering its importance, this paper presents an initial attempt to capture, in the pattern form, a set of proven solutions to recurrent problems of understanding frameworks. The fundamental objective of this work is to help non-experts on being more effective when trying to learn and understand object-oriented frameworks.