An application development framework must cooperate closely with various CASE tools, such as version and configuration control utilities. Especially for such large software systems as CAD frameworks (see also Figure 1.2), with a considerable number of integrated applications, software configuration management is a key ingredient and backbone for application development. An unmodified make utility [64] is the standard approach for small-scale software projects. This utility is available (often in slightly different implementations) on a large variety of platforms. But it is also well known that this classical tool only suffices for simple software systems with rather fixed structure and relationships.
For larger and more complex projects, either additional efforts must be undertaken to bypass the limitations of make, or entirely new concepts must be used. An impressive spectrum of both approaches can be found in implementations and in the literature (see, e.g., [65] and [66]). For example, the implementation of the GNU project, gmake[67], corresponds closely to the classical make utility, but has been extended to support multiple directories. Another example for an extension of make is the shell script based imake[68] utility of the original public-domain X11 distribution, which generates input for and executes the native make utility.