During the development of Beyond-Sniff, a distributed multi-user development platform, we were confronted with various, apparently unrelated problems: data, control, and user interface integration of distributed components, system configuration, user specific preferences, etc. Undoubtedly, it is not trivial to find solutions for such issues, but C++ makes it even more challenging due to its static nature and insufficient meta-information. To overcome these shortcomings, we implemented a small and powerful framework called Any. The Any framework augments C++ with a flexible, dynamic, garbage-collected data representation mechanism. It serves as a language-independent data integration vehicle and provides data management and declarative retrieval facilities.
['Kai-Uwe Maetzel', 'Walter R. Bischofberger']
The any framework: a pragmatic approach to flexibility