In this chapter we examine the Little Application Framework, which is a simple framework my students and I developed a few years ago as a vehicle for teaching introductory courses using C++. My intent in this chapter is not so much to talk about the LAF, but to explain how the framework illustrates ideas that are common to many different forms of framework.
Like most frameworks, the little application framework consists of a number of classes, in our case six, which are specialized by means of inheritance. The user specifies application specific behavior, and the code that is common to all applications is inherited from the framework.