Design Patterns for Independent Building Blocks

: The pattern language presented in this paper aims at helping designers to develop reusable building blocks that can be plugged together as needed by the application to be built. The patterns try to identify essential properties of reusable software. In particular, we show that extensive standardization is not a necessary prerequisite of reusability as long as interfaces are designed in a way that supports building block adaptation. We hope that the presented design approach will be a small step towards the long envisioned "software factory". Introduction Over the decades, many different ways to design and develop software have been invented. Deciding which way to take in a given situation has become difficult not only for novices, but also for experts. Many design approaches are competing with each other, and the followers of one method usually claim that theirs is superior to all others. Nevertheless, almost any approach was successfully used to produce elegant software. However, n..