Not only the design of complex frameworks is hard, but also the reuse of such artefacts. Furthermore, the internal working of different frameworks is usually not compatible so that two or more frameworks can hardly be combined. As alternative we propose framelets as small architectural building blocks that can be easily understood, modified and combined. The paper first discusses the concepts underlying framelets and presents a sample framelet implemented in Java. 1 Why small is beautiful Although object-oriented frameworks are currently one of the most promising approaches to large-scale reuse of software, they have significant problems reported by several authors (e.g., Bosch et al., 1998; Casais, 1995; Fayad and Schmidt, 1997; Sparks et al., 1996; Johnson, 1992; Lewis, 1995):