Taligent believes that frameworks provide the foundation for exploiting
object-oriented technology. Frameworks provide an infrastructure that decreases the amount of code that a programmer must develop, test, and debug. Developers write only the code necessary to extend or control the framework's behavior to suit the requirements of a specific application.

Frameworks also allow two subsystems to interact while protecting them from knowledge of each other (they need know only about the framework); whereas a class interface only protects the client from the implementation of the provider. So frameworks not only provide predesigned sets of classes, but also encapsulate details in a way that lets multiple system components be connected together, a feature which individual classes cannot manage.

The Taligent Application Environment uses frameworks extensively, providing application-level frameworks for text and graphics editing, as well as underlying support frameworks for networking, device drivers, file system support, and I/O.