Patterns Tool

A topic that people are starting to think about more and more often these days is the idea of a PatternsTool that you can use along with more conventional OO design tools and languages to help you utilize patterns.

The ultimate PatternsTool (to me) would work in forward and reverse engineering mode. In forward engineering mode it would help code your classes from a description of how classes would interact.

For instance you might give the PatternsTool a set of class names and say "These classes are a composite -- this one's a composite class, these over here are primitive classes, now generate me the class definitions and method stubs to represent that."

In reverse-engineering mode it would look through your code and design diagrams and tell you "You implemented a Chain of Responsibility here, etc."

Any thoughts?

--KyleBrown

In the future I want to describe to my computer (by voice of course ;-) what to build. It will need to understand a language (alas, full english is just to ambiguous). I use to think that language would be a subset of english, but nowadays I wonder if a PatternLanguage would do the trick. However, I think that I am looking far into the future here.

In the meantime, I think that it may be premature to suggest that DesignPatterns have been taken far enough to start programming machines to help us generate code using them. Then again, it may be my prejudices against CaseTools talking here....

I like the reverse engineering bit though. Hmmm... I wonder how I could feed new DesignPatterns to the tool...

-- ToddCoram

Since I originally wrote the above I've found out that there are several university groups working on different kinds of PatternsTool. If you're interested, we've established a patterns-tool mailing list out of UIUC. Send email to mailto:patterns-tool-request@cs.uiuc.edu to subscribe.