Cyrille Martraire

For tools to be aware of patterns, the patterns must be formalized, at least partially. At this point I must quote Gregor Hohpe to clarify my thoughts, as I strongly agree with his skipticism: Typically, when people ask me about « codifying » or « toolifying » patterns my first reaction is one of skepticism. Patterns are meant to [...]

Over time, patterns have appeared on many different topics, not all related to programming. Here is a list of patterns and pointers to other lists of patterns, to illustrate two things: Knowledge and experience in general can be packaged into patterns, often using the pattern form. Patterns are convenient for reuse, in any domain. There [...]

In nature, out of every possible arrangement of several elements, only a few arrangements are stable. This is illustrated with atoms combined together, or smaller particles arranged together into atoms, where not every combination is sustainable. Unstable arrangements tend to move toward stable ones over time. Whenever you observe the elements, you mostly see stable [...]

Patterns represent a couple (intent, solution); sometime they refer to a solution, more often they essentially represents an intent, independently of its solution. Sometimes the solution part of patterns includes a trick or a workaround to overcome the limits of a language, but patterns cannot be reduced to that trick. Indeed, a very important role [...]

Low coupling between objects is a key principle to help you win the battle against software entropy. Making sure your dependencies are under control matters. Several tools can enforce dependencies restrictions, such as JDepend. However in a real project with many classes, packages and modules, the real issue is how to decide and configure the [...]

In finance, options are powerful tools for traders, and many design practices including design patterns can be seen as options. Options can -perhaps- yield a great benefit for a certain and immediate cost. If this cost is cheap enough it can be quite attractive. An option to buy a stock is a right to buy [...]

Composite patterns, such a the Bureaucracy pattern, are patterns built by the composition of other « smaller » patterns. However even usual design patterns can be considered composite patterns made of smaller subpatterns. The goal is therefore to find out which are the main subpatterns that enable to reconstruct as many design patterns as possible. The subpatterns [...]

As part of the Patternity effort, I spent some time creating a simple Java API to generate UML diagrams programmatically from Java, in SVG format. This small API called for now Patternity Graphic is working and available here: patternitygraphic_src as a source Zip (alpha release of course). It can render small class diagrams with hierarchic, [...]

After my initial attempt at doing something useful and automated around design patterns, I started working again on a brand new version of a pattern-aware tool: Patternity. No more code generation, the focus is now on the generation of documentation artifacts (UML class and sequence diagrams, reports, enhanced Javadoc…) from the source code annotated with [...]

I have experimented an approach that considers every design pattern as the recursive composition of smaller patterns. This led to a prototype tool to illustrate its benefits by generating design-level documentation of annotated source code. Eat your own dog food The source code of this tool itself was used as the code base to apply [...]