Ontology-driven shopping cart and its comparative analysis

Abstract

Design Patterns are formal solutions to commonly occurring design problems in software development. Compound Patterns are amalgamation of two or more individual Design Patterns. In spite of having advantages, they have certain limitations in the form of coupling, increased dependency between class hierarchies and several others. In this paper we present a comparative analysis between the ontology driven Compound Pattern and their classical GOF (Gang of Four) version. We have implemented a shopping cart application based on a compound pattern comprising visitor, observer and strategy Patterns. We, then implemented the same application based on ontology driven version of the compound pattern and then compared the two designs. We found that the ontological approach has certain edges over the former one in terms of modifiability and maintainability. The application based on ontology driven design pattern even adapts to some changes made during the runtime. The end users can make changes in the ontology driven application and thus change its behavior altogether during the run time. We conducted some modifications during non-runtime conditioned in both applications and got convincing results. We noted that the time and effort required to extend the application is much less in ontology version than in the GOF version.