Pattern Oriented Software Architecture Volume 5: On Patterns and Pattern Languages

16 All Good Things…

May the forces be with you.

Grady Booch

In this final chapter we reflect upon our fifteen-year mission to fulfill the vision of Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture. We provide a retrospective that reaches back to where we started and outlines the paths we took to reach the destination of our long journey.

In this sequence of chapters, there is one last thing from our queue to say: all good things come to an end. The POSA series has run its course. For a decade and a half we have been working on and with patterns—mining, documenting, applying, and teaching them, and exploring their conceptual foundations. This effort started modestly in 1992 as an effort to document the development experiences we encountered in software projects just for ourselves, to help us to avoid reinventing the wheel in subsequent projects. Over time the POSA endeavor grew in scope, with many people from the patterns community joining the project, contributing to it, or otherwise supporting us with their advice and help. The results of our work have been published in a series of books, of which this is the fifth and last. It provides a capstone to our work that connects the patterns and pattern languages we published in the four earlier volumes.

From its inception, our work on patterns has followed the vision of Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, which serves as both the name and the theme of our series of books. This theme underscores our belief that patterns should not just ...