Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design

Summary

In this chapter, I showed how the standard way of doing designs can often lock us into systems that are hard to maintain. Often, it can be difficult to see the forest for the trees because I become overly focused on the details of the system—the classes.

Christopher Alexander gives us a better way. By using patterns in the problem domain, I can look at the problem in a different way. I start with the big picture and add distinctions as I go. Each pattern gives me more information than what I had before I used it.

By selecting the pattern that creates the biggest picture—the context for the system—and then inserting the next significant pattern, I developed an application architecture that I could not have seen by looking at the classes ...