Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture For Dummies

Chapter 7

Building Your Own Pattern Catalog

In This Chapter

• Creating a personal catalog of patterns
• Updating your pattern catalog

When you start using patterns to solve your design problems, you'll find that you have a few favorites — the ones that you know inside and out and refer to frequently to solve the kinds of problems that you usually confront in your software development.

To make your work easier, you should record these favorite patterns in your own pattern catalog for future reference. You can turn to this pattern catalog when you start a new design problem to get an idea of how to structure your solution. You also can turn back to it to follow the implementation steps that tell you how to incorporate the pattern's solution in your design. That way, you don't have to memorize all the details of all the forces or all the implementation steps, because the catalog holds all that information.

The patterns in your personal catalog constitute a collection and include pattern languages or parts of languages that are useful to you. It's your own personal “software handbook.” You may include patterns from different pattern languages — one for interactive system design, one for logging, and another for user interface design, for example — as well as patterns that aren't included in complete languages, like the ones in Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides (Addison-Wesley Professional). ...