What are the methods of combining more than two programs?

[Xinnan]

Our team has written a project with C++ separately, and each of them is responsible for different functions.
How to combine the separate programs into same platform?
Help me!! Or suggest me some references!!!

[JavierL]

inheritance or composition.. you name it

[Xinnan]

Thank you for your reply.
I meant I have to build a platform which suits the similar projects.
Could you suggest me some references,plea se?

[Oralloy]

What sort of platform are you trying to build?

[Xinnan]

For example, the functions are calculations of capacity, transmission, distribution and dynamic pricing. The platform can combine some of or all of these functions in similar projects.
In another word, a member of a team is only responsible for programming one function and the platform can combine the functions into a project.

[Oralloy]

Well, you have to design a "Forrest of Independent Trees".

In other words, you have to design a series of tools, and then break down the existing work into the toolkit that you built. You can use rapid refactorinig techniques, to get this right in a fairly straightforward way.

Then you add additional tools to your kit on an as-needed (or as-developed) basis.

The trick is to design the individual tools so that they are independent of each other. The glue mechanism will be an abstract interface of some sort. There are a lot of mechanisms that you can explore. My preferences include Blackboards and Abstract messaging.

There is nothing wrong with having a central toolkit, which implements the basic interfaces and messaging. After all, that's what COM and SOAP are all about, just to name a couple examples.

If you design your toolkit correctly, you can implement as shared objects (.so under Linux, .DLL under Windoze) that are loaded at run-time. Done right, you have an extensible library of tools, and any corrections that you implement will be automatically propagated through the entire system without rebuilding the top-level executables.

Good Luck, it sounds like you've got a fun project there.

[Xinnan]

Thank you so much, I will work hard on it.