ADF Development Fundamentals

This chapter covers the core principles and prototyping techniques crucial for creating an application development framework (ADF). Rather than starting from zero, successful framework development grows out of careful analysis and abstraction of existing application patterns. By spotting the most common control flows, reusable components, and general-purpose features in current applications, developers can build a strong foundation. This approach speeds up the development of future applications in the same domain.

Using real examples, we demonstrate how to prototype a framework by breaking out key components and defining execution flows in stages. As a concrete example, we build a simple agent-oriented framework designed for applications that use large language models (LLMs). This framework abstracts recurring tasks – including user input handling, system prompt generation, model calls, and response parsing – into modular, composable...