Details a new approach to designing, documenting, and inspecting application-specific customized software based on object-oriented frameworks, explaining how to select custom instances of object-oriented frameworks to suit application needs, and how to develop high-performance distributed systems. Surveys new research in object-oriented technologies, and offers application-oriented examples in areas such as shared-memory multiprocessors. Of interest to software engineers, and graduate students studying operating systems, parallel programming, and object-oriented programming. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.