Architecture Handbook Workshop

A significant event in the HistoryOfPatterns: BruceAnderson held his first OopsLa workshop in 1991, following a successful BOF at OopsLa '90. It was called "Towards an Architecture Handbook". It was a very influential workshop, pulling together lots of interesting people and starting many interesting projects. The GangOfFour met here for the first time, though they didn't know they would be working together. RalphJohnson's important HotDraw paper came out of a workshop exercise by KentAndRalphAtTheArchitectureWorkshop.

Here is the full roster for the workshop...

• BruceAnderson, Essex and Wizard Systems
• Peter Bahrs, IBM Boca Raton
• KentBeck, MasPar
• WardCunningham, Wyatt Software
• Desmond D'Souza, MCC
• ErichGamma, UBILab
• John Gilbert, Objective Control
• Sanjiv Gossain, NOKIA Telecom
• Martin Griss, HP Labs
• Eiichi Hanyuda, Fuji Xerox
• Kim Harris, HP Corporate Engineering
• Bill Harrison , IBM Watson
• RichardHelm , IBM Watson
• Ian Holland, Northeastern
• RalphJohnson, Illinois
• NormKerth, Elite Systems
• Adrienne Kleiboemer, Mitre
• DougLea, Oswego/Syracuse
• Elgin Lee, ParcPlace
• Dan Lesage, Object Technology International
• Cathy Linn, Microsoft
• Makoto Minagawa, Fuji Xerox
• Xavier Pintado, Geneva
• WolfgangPree, Linz
• Larry Rosenstein, Apple
• Bill Ruh, Mitre
• Nacho Silva-Lepe, Northeastern
• JohnVlissides, Stanford
• Bob Wilhelm, Objective Control

WardAndKent were arguing strongly that patterns should be the guiding principle of an architecture handbook. Most of the rest of the group thought he was crazy. He who laughs last ...

BruceAnderson held the second "Towards an Architecture Handbook" workshop at OOPSLA'92. The world had changed in a year. ErichGamma, RichardHelm, and JohnVlissides had a draft of a pattern catalog that they hoped to get ready for ECOOP'93, RalphJohnson had a paper on patterns accepted for OOPSLA'92, FrankBuschmann was talking about the pattern catalog he was developing at Siemens, and Kent was starting to feel that perhaps time was on his side after all.

Bruce is a marvelous workshop leader. If you ever have an opportunity to attend a workshop he is leading, take it! There is no guarantee that it will be as influential as the first architecture handbook workshop, but you never know!

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The workshop was a landmark for me. I had a great side discussion with RichardHelm, about what it was like to be famous before you really felt ready. I wrote my first pattern there, something like the State pattern. This was important because I had been trying to write a pattern for six years without success, and I was beginning to suspect it was difficult. I also had a great time with RalphJohnson working on reuse patterns for HotDraw and having NormKerth use them. I also got a big dose of how wacky was wacky from BruceAnderson. -- KentBeck

As a graduate student, the workshop was a learning experience to me. I was part of the minority of voices proposing the importance of interpretive languages and scripts in OS, apps and devices. Years later, Java became dominant.