Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, A System of Patterns

About this Book

This is a book about patterns for software architecture, or simply, patterns. Patterns have been drawing considerable attention over recent years: workshops, tutorials, forums for electronic discussion, papers in journals and whole books are being devoted to patterns. The pattern community has even started its own conference. All this enthusiastic discussion of patterns makes them seem as if they are the climax of the ‘object wave’.

What is so exciting about patterns? It is probably the fact that they constitute a ‘grass roots’ effort to build on the collective experience of skilled designers and software engineers. Such experts already have solutions to many recurring design problems. Patterns capture these proven solutions in an easily-available and, hopefully, well-written form.

We want this book to support both novices and experts in software development. It should help novices to act as if they were—or almost as if they were—experts on modest-sized projects, without having to gain many years of experience. It should support experts in the design of large-scale and complex software systems with defined properties. It should also enable them to learn from the experience of other experts. The book should help both groups to find well-proven solutions, as well as alternatives, to specific design problems.

The book is intended to be both an instructive text and a reference guide. It helps software developers to think about software architecture in a new way, and ...