About Patterns:

Patterns for software development are one of the latest "hot topics" to emerge from the object-oriented community. They are a literary form of software engineering problem-solving discipline that has its roots in a design movement of the same name in contemporary architecture, literate programming, and the documentation of best practices and lessons learned in all vocations.

Fundamental to any science or engineering discipline is a common vocabulary for expressing its concepts, and a language for relating them together. The goal of patterns within the software community is to create a body of literature to help software developers resolve recurring problems encountered throughout all of software development. Patterns help create a shared language for communicating insight and experience about these problems and their solutions. Formally codifying these solutions and their relationships lets us successfully capture the body of knowledge which defines our understanding of good architectures that meet the needs of their users. Forming a common pattern language for conveying the structures and mechanisms of our architectures allows us to intelligibly reason about them. The primary focus is not so much on technology as it is on creating a culture to document and support sound engineering architecture and design.

A pattern is the abstraction from a concrete form which keeps recurring in specific non-arbitrary contexts.
-Dirk Riehle and Heinz Zullighoven

The [GoF] book defines design patterns as

"descriptions of communicating objects and classes that are customized to solve a general design problem in a particular context."

It then goes on to say that:

A design pattern names, abstracts, and identifies the key aspects of a common design structure that make it useful for creating a reusable object-oriented design. The design pattern identifies the participating classes and their instances, their roles and collaborations, and the distribution of responsibilities. Each design pattern focuses on a particular object-oriented design problem or issue. It describes when it applies, whether or not in can be applied in view of other design constraints, and the consequences and trade-offs of its use. Se we must eventually implement our designs, a design pattern also provides sample ... code to illustrate an implementation. Although design patterns describe object-oriented designs, they are based on practical solutions that have been implemented in mainstream object-oriented programming languages ....

[ Gof ]
Gof, Group of Four, refers to Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides.

[ The information provided above is partially or fully obtained from this book, which is reproduced here for reference only. ]

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