Generative Design Patterns

A design pattern encapsulates the knowledge of object-oriented designers into re-usable artifacts. A design pattern is a descriptive device that fosters software design re-use. There are several reasons why design patterns are not used as generative constructs that support code re-use. The first reason is that design patterns describe a set of solutions to a family of related design problems and it is difficult to generate a single body of code that adequately solves each problem in the family. A second reason is that it is difficult to construct and edit generative design patterns. A third major impediment is the lack of a tool-independent representation. A common representation could lead to a shared repository to make more patterns available. In this paper we describe a new approach to generative design patterns that solves these three difficult problems. We illustrate this approach using tools called CO2P2S and Meta-CO2P2S, but our approach is tool-independent.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: KBSE
• Authors: Steve MacDonald, Duane Szafron, Jonathan Schaeffer, John Anvik, Steven Bromling, Kai Tan
• Keywords: Design Patterns, Generative Design Patterns, KBSE 2002, Software Design Re-use, Software Engineering