Specification of Software Patterns for Pattern-Oriented Software

The described meta model below is rather a strong recommendation than a limi-tation. Changes are possible, but since this meta model is the interface between the DSD project and the related student project PG POSE in Paderborn, you should not modify it on your own. Please let us know if you have any sugges-tions to enhance the meta model or adapt the meta model to your own requirements. Although this document takes GoF design patterns [GHJV95] as examples for explaining the meta-model, the meta-model is not limited to those. The meta-model should cover other types of patterns, like architectural patterns (e.g. [BMR+96]) and also different catalogs of software patterns (e.g. J2EE Patterns [ACM03]). For further reading check the bibliography at the end of this document. 2 Meta-model The following section describes the meta-model of the framework for managing patterns. The meta-model defines the possible structure of the framework and will serve as a basis for the generation of the Ecore data in the EMF. The meta-model itself is shown in figure 1. The class PatternCatalog is the root element in the meta model. A Pattern-Catalog has a name, a description and contains an arbitrary number of Patterns. For example, there could be a PatternCatalog named ”Gang of Four patterns”, which contains the 23 design patterns from [GHJV95]. The class Pattern which is contained in a PatternCatalog represents a single pattern. A Pattern has a name and an arbitrary number of PatternVariants, which are described below. For example, a Pattern could represent the design pat-tern Observer which is included in the PatternCatalog ”Gang of Four patterns”. To enhance the organization of a pattern catalog, patterns can be sorted into categories. For that purpose a PatternCatalog contains an arbitrary number of Categories. A Category has a name and an arbitrary number of subCategories. A Category refers to an arbitrary number of Patterns, a Pattern refers to an ar-bitrary number of Categories. In the PatternCatalog ”Gang of Four patterns”, there could be, for example the three Categories, which reflect the purpose o