Representing and applying design patterns: What is the problem?

Abstract

Design patterns embody proven solutions to recurring design problems. Ever since the gang of four popularized the concept, researchers have been trying to develop methods for representing design patterns, and applying them to modeling problems. To the best of our knowledge, none of the approaches proposed so far represents the design problem that the pattern is meant to solve, explicitly. An explicit representation of the problem has several advantages, including 1) a better characterization of the problem space addressed by the pattern - better than the textual description embodied in pattern documentation templates, 2) a more natural representation of the transformations embodied in the application of the pattern, and 3) a better handle on the automatic detection and application of patterns. In this paper, we describe the principles underlying our approach, and the current implementation in the Eclipse Modeling Framework™. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.