Design pattern: What is software design patterns?

In software engineering,

A design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design.

A design pattern is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations. Object-oriented design patterns typically show relationships and interactions between classes or objects, without specifying the final application classes or objects that are involved. Many patterns imply object-orientation or more generally mutable state, and so may not be as applicable in functional programming languages, in which data is immutable or treated as such.

Design patterns reside in the domain of modules and interconnections. At a higher level there are architectural patterns that are larger in scope, usually describing an overall pattern followed by an entire system.

There are many types of design patterns, like Algorithm strategy patterns addressing concerns related to high-level strategies describing how to exploit application characteristic on a computing platform. Computational design patterns addressing concerns related to key computation identification. Execution patterns that address concerns related to supporting application execution, including strategies in executing streams of tasks and building blocks to support task synchronization. Implementation strategy patterns addressing concerns related to implementing source code to support program organization, and the common data structures specific to parallel programming. Structural design patterns addressing concerns related to high-level structures of applications being developed.

Also:

A design pattern describes a recurring design problem to be solved, a solution to the problem, and the context in which that solution works (Buschmann et al. 1996; Gamma et al. 1995). The description specifies objects and classes that are customized to solve a general design problem in a particular context. A design pattern is a larger-grained form of reuse than a class because it involves more than one class and the interconnection among objects from different classes. A design pattern is sometimes referred to as microarchitecture.

After the original success of the design pattern concept, other kinds of patterns were developed. The main kinds of reusable patterns are as follows:

·         Design patterns. In a widely cited book (Gamma et al. 1995), design patterns were described by four software designers – Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides – who were named in some quarters as the “gang of four.” A design pattern is a small group of collaborating objects.

·         Architectural patterns. This work was described by Buschmann et al. (1996) at Siemens. Architectural patterns are larger-grained than design patterns, addressing the structure of major subsystems of a system.

·         Analysis patterns. Analysis patterns were described by Fowler (2002), who found similarities during analysis of different application domains. He described recurring patterns found in object-oriented analysis and described them with static models, expressed in class diagrams.

·         Product line–specific patterns. These are patterns used in specific application areas, such as factory automation (Gomaa 2005) or electronic commerce. By concentrating on a specific application domain, design patterns can provide more tailored domain-specific solutions.

·         Idioms. Idioms are low-level patterns that are specific to a given programming language and describe implementation solutions to a problem that use the features of the language – for example, Java or C++. These patterns are closest to code, but they can be used only by applications that are coded in the same programming language.