Java Design Patterns: A Tutorial - Softcover

Cooper, James William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201485397 ISBN 13: 9780201485394

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2000

Synopsis

Design patterns have become a staple of object-oriented design and programming by providing elegant, easy-to-reuse, and maintainable solutions to commonly encountered programming challenges. However, many busy Java programmers have yet to learn about design patterns and incorporate this powerful technology into their work. Java Design Patterns is exactly the tutorial resource you need. Gentle and clearly written, it helps you understand the nature and purpose of design patterns. It also serves as a practical guide to using design patterns to create sophisticated, robust Java programs. This book presents the 23 patterns cataloged in the flagship book Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides. In Java Design Patterns, each of these patterns is illustrated by at least one complete visual Java program. This practical approach makes design pattern concepts more concrete and easier to grasp, brings Java programmers up to speed quickly, and enables you to take practical advantage of the power of design patterns. Key features include: *Introductory overviews of design patterns, the Java Foundation Classes (JFC), and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) *Screen shots of each of

About this title

From the Inside Flap

This is a practical book that tells you how to write Java programs using some of the most common design patterns. It is structured as a series of short chapters, each describing a design pattern and giving one or more complete, working, visual example programs that use that pattern. Each chapter also includes Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams illustrating how the classes interact.

This book is not a "companion" book to the well-known Design Patterns text Gamma, 1995 by the "Gang of Four." Rather, it is a tutorial for people who want to learn what design patterns are about and how to use them in their work. You need not have read Design Patterns to gain from reading this book, but when you are done here you might want to read or reread that book to gain additional insights.

In this book, you will learn that design patterns are a common way to organize objects in your programs to make those programs easier to write and modify. You'll also see that by familiarizing yourself with these design patterns, you will gain a valuable vocabulary for discussing how your programs are constructed.

People come to appreciate design patterns in different ways--from the highly theoretical to the intensely practical--and when they finally see the great power of these patterns, they experience an "Aha!" moment. Usually this moment means that you suddenly had an internal picture of how that pattern can help you in your work.

In this book, we try to help you form that conceptual idea, or gestalt, by describing the pattern in as many ways as possible. The book is organized into six main sections:

An introductory description A description of patterns grouped into three sections: Creational, Structural, and Behavioral A description of the Java Foundation Classes (JFC) showing the patterns they illustrate A set of case studies where patterns have been helpful

For each pattern, we start with a brief verbal description and then build simple example programs. Each example is a visual program that you can run and examine so as to make the pattern as concrete as possible. All of the example programs and their variations are on the CD-ROM that accompanies this book. In that way, you can run them, change them, and see how the variations that you create work.

All of the programs are based on Java 1.2, and most use the JFC. If you haven't taken the time to learn how to use these classes, there is a tutorial covering the basics in Appendix A where we also discuss some of the patterns that they illustrate.

Since each of the examples consists of a number of Java files for each of the classes we use in that example, we also provide a Visual SlickEdit project file for each example and place each example in a separate subdirectory to prevent any confusion.

As you leaf through the book, you'll see screen shots of the programs we developed to illustrate the design patterns; these provide yet another way to reinforce your learning of these patterns. You'll also see UML diagrams of these programs that illustrate the interactions between classes in yet another way. UML diagrams are just simple box and arrow illustrations of classes and their inheritance structure, with the arrows pointing to parent classes and dotted arrows pointing to interfaces. If you are unfamiliar with UML, we provide a simple introduction in the first chapter.

Finally, since we used JVISION to create the UML diagrams in each chapter, we provide the original JVISION diagram files for each pattern as well, so you can use your own copy of JVISION to play with them.

When you finish this book, you'll be comfortable with the basics of design patterns and will be able to start using them in your day to day Java programming work. James W. Cooper
Wilton, CT
Nantucket, MA
November, 1999

0201485397P04062001

About the Author

James W. Cooper is a research staff member in the Advanced Information Retrieval and Analysis Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He is also a columnist for Java Pro magazine and a reviewer for Visual Basic Programmer's Journal. He has published 14 books, which include Principles of Object-Oriented Programming Using Java 1.1 (Ventana) and The Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to Java (Ventana).

0201485397AB05132002

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0201485397
• ISBN 13: 9780201485394
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 329