Towards the representation of design patterns as design components

Design patterns encapsulate accumulated software design knowledge and implementation experience. While they exist, in general, as informal guidelines that describe reusable design solutions to recurring problems in software development, they are not available as code abstractions and thus not ready to be incorporated into a concrete system implementation. In order to propagate the design patterns\u27 reusability from design phase to implementation phase, this work presents an approach that differentiates between code-reusable and non-code-reusable design patterns. Using this classification, we develop a method that allows for representing code-reusable design patterns as reusable design components. These design components, when applied to application-specific design participants via well-defined protocols and/or interfaces, output concrete pattern-specific code ready to be incorporated into concrete system implementations. Through experimentation on GoF\u27s design pattern catalog, we have identified 12 design patterns that can be classified as code-reusable and promoted them to reusable design components. These design components, although implemented in Java, exhibit very similar properties as shown in Hannemann and Kiczales\u27 AspectJ implementation of design patterns in terms of reusability and pluggability

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Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 60-61).by Jason A. Wilson.M.Eng