TRANSACTIONS ON PATTERN LANGUAGES OF PROGRAMMING I

From conception to birth is traditionally nine months. The first emails regarding the volume you now hold in your hands—or the bits you have downloaded onto your screen—are dated 11 June 2005. From conception to birth has taken over four years. Springer’s LNCS Transactions on Pattern Languages of Programming is dedicated, first and foremost, to promoting, promulgating, presenting, describing, critiquing, interrogating, and evaluating all aspects of the use of patterns in programming. In the 15 years or so since Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides’s Design Patterns became widely available, software patterns have become a highly effective means of improving the quality of programming, software engineering, system design, and development. Patterns capture the best practices of software design, making them available to everyone participating in the production of software. A key goal of the Transactions Series is to present material that is validated. Every contributed paper that appears in this volume has been reviewed by both patterns experts and domain experts, by researchers and practitioners. This reviewing process begins long before the paper is even submitted to Transactions. Every paper in the Series is first presented and critiqued at one of the Pattern Languages of Programming (PLoP) conferences held annually around the world. Prior to the conference, each submitted paper is assigned a shepherd who works with the authors to improve the paper. Based on several rounds of feedback, a paper may proceed to a writers’ workshop at the conference itself.

The Transactions on Pattern Languages of Programming subline aims to publish papers on patterns and pattern languages as applied to software design, development, and use, throughout all phases of the software life cycle, from requirements and design to implementation, maintenance and evolution. The primary focus of this LNCS Transactions subline is on patterns, pattern collections, and pattern languages themselves. The journal also includes reviews, survey articles, criticisms of patterns and pattern languages, as well as other research on patterns and pattern languages.

This book, the first volume in the Transactions on Pattern Languages of Programming series, presents eight papers that have been through a careful peer review process involving both pattern experts and domain experts, by researchers and practitioners. The papers cover a wide range of topics, from the architectural design of large-scale systems down to very detailed design for microcontroller-based embedded systems. The first paper presents a substantial pattern language for constructing an important part of an integrated development environment. The following papers present patterns for batching requests in client-server systems; graceful degradation to handle errors and exceptions; and accurate timing delays. Two papers present related patterns that address aspects of service-oriented architectures, considering synchronization and workflow integration. Finally, the last two papers show how patterns can be combined into systems and then used to document those systems’ designs.