The Pierre Auger Observatory is designed to unveil the nature and origin of the highest energy cosmic rays through the analysis of extensive air showers. The large and geographically dispersed collaboration of physicists and the wide-ranging collection of simulation and reconstruction tasks pose some special challenges for the offline analysis software. They have designed and implemented a general purpose framework which allows Auger collaborators to contribute algorithms and configuration instructions to build up the variety of applications they require. The framework includes machinery to manage these user codes, to organize the abundance of user-contributed configuration files, to facilitate multi-format file handling, and to provide access to event and time-dependent detector information residing in many data sources. A number of utilities are also provided, including a novel geometry package allowing manipulation of abstract geometrical objects independent of coordinate system choice. The framework is implemented in C++ and takes advantage of object oriented design and common open source tools, while keeping the user-side simple enough for C++ novices to learn in a reasonable time. The distribution system incorporates unit and acceptance testing in order to support rapid development of both the core framework and the contributed user codes.
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