One of the most critical elements in the success of software development, in terms of both product quality and development productivity, is the underlying application framework. I like to think of the application framework as if it were a huge abstract class, which developers extend in order to create application systems. One of the greatest features of the Java language is its support of inheritance. By allowing modules to inherit common code from ancestral modules, much of the work in creating a new module of a standard type is virtually eliminated. If you simply expand this very same philosophy out to the application system level, you can begin to see how much time and effort you can save in both development and testing by having a solid base of code from which to start all application system development projects.

Many features and functions of a quality application system product are universal. By creating universal code to handle these functions, that portion of the development effort does not have to be redone for every application development project. When development is approached in this way, not only do you get the immediate benefits of not having to design, develop, and test what should be standard functionality, you also get the added bonus of consistency across applications. Because all applications share the same base code, they will all tend to operate in the same manner, with consistent behavior for similar functions. This is accomplished, by the way, without anyone having to enforce any kind of arbitrary standard--it just happens by default from sharing the same code.

What is really universal?
Whenever you discuss this kind of approach with most developers, you always get a certain amount of resistance. Usually, this hesitance to embrace a shared base of common code is based on the misperception that somehow their applications or their customers have some kind of obscure requirement that eliminates their particular work from involvement in such a proposal. The truth is, when you really start to look deeply into things, that for most applications there really isn't anything so special about them that they cannot benefit in some way from some set of common functions. Certainly, if you work hard enough at it, you can conceive of some way to approach things that would prevent a particular application from being able to utilize certain common features. However, as I used to tell my kids when they were teenagers, just because you can doesn't mean you should!