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Design Patterns

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Literature Review
Chapter One
Introduction

What is a Design Pattern?

A design pattern solves a problem within a given context. The solution that is offered by implementing a pattern results in a system design structure, which balances the concerns of the design problem in a manner most appropriate for the given context. In “Understanding and Using Patterns in Software Development”, Dirk Riehle and Heinz Zullighaven offer a rather nice definition of what a design pattern is:
“A pattern is the abstraction from a concrete form which keeps recurring in specific non-arbitrary contexts.”
The ability to write good patterns is very difficult. A pattern should not only convey the facts about a system, but it should also tell a story about …show more content…

The patterns described in the GoF book are illustrated in C++; a programming language that has been declining in use over the last number of years, which limits the learning of patterns in today’s development environment where the dominant programming language taught and used, as far as patterns are concerned is Java, although patterns can be implemented in any object orientated programming language.
The patterns exhibited are described in very concise and restricted examples that lack a comprehensive context in order for the reader to gain a full understanding of the use of the pattern in question. The patterns throughout the book are also presented in isolation to each other which hinders the illustration of pattern interaction and thus the full benefit to those wishing to learn how to implement design patterns.
Allen Holub produced a book “Holub on Patterns – Learning Design Patterns by Looking at Code”, which detailed the use of design patterns while developing a game called “Game of Life. The Game of Life is a cellular automation program, which begins with cells that are classed as either “alive” or “dead”. The idea is then that each cell follows a set of rules to determine which whether it can “live” or whether it must “die”.
Holubs’ book, published in 2004 addressed some of the shortcomings of the GoF publication, such as the patterns were now demonstrated in Java, which has become the favoured language of the software development industry,

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