Lecture 8: Writing Patterns

This lecture focused on how patterns are written. Our lecturer explained how organisations such as PLOP hold writer's workshop.

These workshops seem to be carefully organised, ensuring that both the authors of the patterns and moderators get the best out of the workshop. However, I think its a disadvantage to the author of the pattern that the size of the workshop is quite limited. The author might not be able to utilize the full benefit of the workshop.

I understand that a lot of people are not allowed in the workshops, to avoid overcrowding and there might be a need to dispense non -authors evenly among other workshops that might be going on. It might be a good idea to list the patterns discussed in the workshops on the organisation's (such as PLOP) website and linking a forum to it, which the authors and non-authors can discuss the pattern put forward.

During the lecture we had a go at writing patterns ourselves. Our lecturer suggested that we write a pattern on any topic of our choice. The pattern was written in the Gang of Four format. I find it easier writing in the GoF format rather than Alexander. The GoF format appeals more to myself because I feel it has better structure and each information entered in every section from the Pattern Name through to Related Patterns were clear and precise.

Lecture 7: Pattern Catalogues

We had a look at some pattern books during this lecture, this was just to get an idea of the number of patterns available or rather documented. I had no idea that therewere just a vast amount, too much to through individually during the lecture.

Our lecturer decided we should go through as many books as possible and looking up patterns or information stands out to us. I went through about 3 books at detail and discovered the following abouyt them.

The Pattern Almanac 2000 by Linda Rising

This book can be considered a s a reference to all widely published patterns and patter collections. It includes a comprensive index of patterns, pattern collections, authors and citations.

Enterprise Solution Patterns using Microsoft .NET

I found this book more interesting, this was probably due to the fact that I had no idea that they were patterns for deployment of any application, imagine my surprise to learn that there was were patterns for deployment on an Enterprise scale. This book had collection of patterns for web presentation, deployment, distributed systems, services, performance and reliability. The pattern i focused on were the deployment patterns.

I reading up the Layered Application pattern I discovered how to structure an application to support operational requirements such as scalability and reusability. This gave me an idea on how I could apply this in m y final year dissertation.

Pattern Hatching by John Vlissides

This book suggested discusses what is a pattern and why people get confused when labelling a pattern. A pattern must be recurrence (making solution relevant outside the immediate one), teaching (understanding to tailor the solution to a variant of the problem) and named. According to Vlissides, a popular misconception is that patterns are rules (programming tricks) that could be applied mindlessly. This is should not the case at all.