Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 3: Patterns for Resource Management

8 The Past, Present, and Future of Patterns

“History rarely happens in the right order or at the right time, but the job of a historian is to make it appear as if it did.”

James Burke

Konrad Adenauer, Germany's first Chancellor after World War II, once said: “Was gebe ich um mein Geschwatz von gestern” (“I don't care about my waffle from yesterday”). Seldom does it happen that you can reflect on your predictions about the future, even less that you have the opportunity to reflect on them twice! Obviously this is a benefit of co-authoring a series of books.

In this chapter, therefore, we revisit our forecasts about the future of patterns that appeared in the second volume of the POSA series, Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects [POSA2] in 2000. We discuss the directions that patterns have taken in the past four years, analyze where patterns are now, and—with the benefit of hindsight—revise our vision about the future of patterns.

8.1 The Past Four Years at a Glance

In Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects [POSA2] we predicted how we thought patterns would evolve. Four years later we summarize what actually happened. We reference much of the relevant work during this period, although our list is not exhaustive. Additional references are available at http://hillside.net/patterns/.

Patterns

In 2000 we forecast that patterns would be published primarily for the following domains: distributed objects, real-time and embedded systems, mobile systems, business transactions ...