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Lessons Learned -- Reuse

© Faisal Bin Bashir

Lessons learned from reuse in software development can be applied to Web page development. Web page developers rarely want to reuse existing pages completely, but they may want to reuse existing page components.

In older languages such as C, element types are tied directly to code performing operations on them. In new languages such as Ada and Java, generic code specifications allow the type to be passed as a parameter, thus combining both reuse and type safety. This technique separates the static (the operations the code must perform) from the dynamic (the different instructions needed for each data type).

In order to promote reuse in Web pages, static and dynamic aspects must also be separated. Here, dynamic aspects are the various links among Web pages forming a directed graph, and static aspects are the text and graphics contained in the pages. The text and graphics are basically attributes attached to the various links within Web pages. Some would argue that links themselves should be typed. Documents, then, would be typed-a feature now available through metatags, which are currently used only for searches.

Providing this separation can help promote reuse in Web page development. A developer may wish to reuse the directed graph of links for existing pages but attach different text and graphics to the links-or a developer may wish to reuse text or graphics from existing pages but attach different links to them. The dynamic link graphs and static text and graphical attributes of Web pages could be placed in libraries, making them widely available for reuse. Related components could also be placed within modules.

Reuse within Web page development could be enhanced through Web page parameterization. When Web pages differ only slightly in content, parameterization on their differences would allow reuse of their structure. The caller would provide both the link address of the referenced Web page and the data required to assign values to the parameters. The referencing page's address could also be a parameter, and the contents of the referenced page could be altered according to who is trying to reference it.

References

"Hypertext: The Next Maintenance Mountain" by Pearl Brereton, David Budgen and Geoff Hamilton

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