Design Patterns Revisited – The Workshop (http://www.laputan.org/patterns/dpr.html)

 

Themes and Goals:

 

Though Chrisopher Alexander's notion of patterns had been part of the object-oriented community since 1987, it didn't really come to the fore until 1994, when the publication of the landmark "Design Patterns" volume by Vlissides, Johnson, Helm, and Gamma provoked a unprecedented “reading frenzy” on the OOPSLA exhibit floor . The so-called "Gang-of-Four" (GoF) book described twenty-three design-level object-oriented patterns. It changed the way we think about object-oriented programming, launched the modern patterns movement in computer science, and spawned the patterns community.

One of the striking things about patterns was that they were distilled from experience and prior art, rather than culled from original research. Since the GoF book was published, hundreds of additional patterns have been added to the pattern canon, but for many, the focus has remained on design-level patterns.

It is at this level that this workshop will focus. We propose then, ten years on, to revisit this fertile vein, with the aim of reviewing, revising, refining, refactoring, and recatagorizing some of the wealth of material that has emerged in this area, and of fostering overdue reflection as to where this area may proceed from here.

THEREFORE, we are soliciting position papers that address the following issues:

·  New pattern classification schemes and taxonomies

·  Ways of weaving existing patterns into full pattern languages

·  Alternative, even revisionist, presentations of design notions covered by existing patterns

·  Presentations of existing patterns as combinations or refactorings of other patterns

·  Papers that address the relationships among patterns, idioms, frameworks, and programming languages and language features

·  Attempts to better place design level patterns in the context of the broader pantheon of patterns

·  Reflections on one or more existing design patterns, in the light of the last decade’s worth of experience

·  Discussions of Gang-of-Four “outtakes” or omissions; or of patterns that should have been elevated into the Design Patterns pantheon, but have not been

 

Organizing Committee

 

Design Patterns Revisited is being organized by four veteran fixtures of both the OOPSLA and Patterns communities. Oddly enough, their geographic distribution uncannily echoes that of the Gang-of-Four: a Champaign-Urbana person, an Antipodean, a Swiss, and a denizen of IBM Research..

 

Primary Organizer, Workshop Chair: Brian Foote, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (foote@laputan.org)

 

Brian will be the principal contact person with the OOPSLA organizing committee. He will be entrusted with ensuring that they receive workshop materials in a timely fashion, and maintain the workshop’s website.

 

Brian has organized numerous OOPSLA workshops over the years (see http://www.laputan.org/, and is himself an elder in the patterns community. He was chair of the Pattern Languages of Programs Conference in 1996. He is one of five people to have attended every OOPSLA Conference to date.

 

Organizer: James Noble, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

 

James Noble is Professor in Computer Science at Victoria University of

Wellington, New Zealand.  He holds and holds a B.Sc (Honors) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Victoria University of Wellington.  He is the co-author (with Charles Weir) of Small Memory Software: Patterns for Systems with Limited Memory, and his research interests range from object-orientation, aliasing, design and methodology, via usability and visualisation, to postmodernism and the semiotics of programming..  James also chaired the KoalaPLoP 2002 conference.

 

Organizer: Dirk Riehle, Stanford University

 

Dirk Riehle is both a software engineer and a software marketeer. He has worked in software patterns for more then 10 years was the main architect and implementor of the first UML virtual machine. Dirk holds a Ph.D. in computer science from ETH Zurich and expects to receive an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2004.  Dirk was an editor of Pattern Languages of Program Design 3, and has published patterns in many other books, conference papers, and magazine articles, and chaired the 1997 EuroPLoP conference.

 

Organizer: Kyle Brown, IBM

 

Kyle Brown is a Senior Technical Staff Member with IBM Software Services for WebSphere. Kyle provides consulting services, education, and mentoring on object-oriented topics and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technologies to Fortune 500 clients. He is co-author of Enterprise Java Programming with IBM WebSphere, 2nd Edition, Enterprise Integration Patterns, and The Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion as well as over 40 papers on Smalltalk, Java, J2EE, and patterns. He is a frequent conference speaker on Enterprise Java, OO design, and design patterns, and chaired the PLoP 2002 conference.   Kyle holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois, and an M.S. in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University.

 

Previous Related Workshops

 

The Design Patterns movement was itself germinated at a series of highly successful OOPSLA Workshops during the early ‘90s, particularly at OOPSLA ’92 (Vancouver I), and OOPSLA ’93 (Washington D.C).

 

This workshop will build on the work of these and other workshops, most notably the OOPSLA 2000 Workshop on Pattern Refactoring (http://www.laputan.org/patterns/pattern-refactoring.html).

 

Expected Number of Participants

 

Minimum: 4

Ideal: 23 (one submission for each GoF pattern)

Maximum: 23

 

Workshop Preparation

 

Participation will be by invitation only. Prospective workshop participants will be expected to prepare and submit a position paper addressing one or more of the workshop’s goals. These materials will be posted to the workshop’s website in advance of the workshop at least four weeks in advance of the conference.

 

Workshop Format and Activities

 

The workshop will revolve primarily around working groups the content of which shall be dictated by the workshop position paper submissions. One or two “keynote” presentations may be selected from among the submitted position papers.

 

Post-Workshop Activities

 

There is considerable interest in pursuing a full-fledged “Design Patterns Revisited” book among a number of the organizers and prospective participants.