Precise Visual Specification of Design Patterns

There has been substantial recent interest in captured design expertise expressed as design patterns. Prevalent descriptions of these design patterns suffer from two demerits. Firstly, they capture specific instances of pattern deployment, rather than the essential pattern itself, thus the spirit of the pattern is often lost in the superfluous details of the specific instances described. Secondly, existing pattern descriptions rely upon relatively informal diagrammatic notations supplemented with natural language annotations. This can result in imprecision and ambiguity. This paper addresses these problems by separating the specification of patterns into three models (role, type, and The most abstract (role-centric) model presents patterns in their purest form, capturing their essential spirit without deleterious detail. A role-model is refined by a type-model (adding usually-domain-specific constraints), which is further refined by a class-model (forming a concrete deployment). We uti...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ECOOP
• Authors: Anthony Lauder, Stuart Kent
• Keywords: Design Patterns, ECOOP 1998, Pattern User, Programming Languages, Specific Instances