Web-based description of design pattern representations

Since the publication of the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by the Eric Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, there has been substantial interest in design patterns in the software engineering community. One of the goals of design patterns is to capture design expertise developed by some of the most experienced developers so that it can be reused even by less experienced programmers. Like other engineering disciplines, the authors presented their materials using a catalog format. That format can present problems for students and practitioners. As an alternative, we suggest to first replace the text-based description with a web-based description to make it easier to browse through the information. Second, we suggest using more graphical design representations for pattern descriptions to reduce the amount of necessary textual details. Using the process of reverse engineering, we recreate the original design representations of various pattern implementations. Third, we provide additional graphical representations to relate the general pattern description to specific implementations. Finally, we provide a web-based prototype of the new representation and shows how a user can take advantage of such representations.