Static and Dynamic Structure in Design Patterns

Eric Eide, Alastair Reid, John Regehr, and Jay Lepreau
{eeide,reid,regehr,lepreau}@cs.utah.edu

University of Utah, School of Computing
50 South Central Campus Drive, Room 3190
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-9205
http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/

Abstract

Design patterns are a valuable mechanism for emphasizing structure, capturing design expertise, and facilitating restructuring of software systems. Patterns are typically applied in the context of an object-oriented language and are implemented so that the pattern participants correspond to object instances that are created and connected at run-time. This paper describes a complementary realization of design patterns, in which many pattern participants correspond to statically instantiated and connected components.

Our approach separates the static parts of the software design from the dynamic parts of the system behavior. This separation makes the software design more amenable to analysis, thus enabling more effective and domain-specific detection of system design errors, prediction of run-time behavior, and more effective optimization. This technique is applicable to imperative, functional, and object-oriented languages: we have extended C, Scheme, and Java with our component model. In this paper, we illustrate our approach in the context of the OSKit, a collection of operating system components written in C.

Appeared in Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2002), pages 208-218, Orlando, FL, May 2002.

© Copyright 2002 by ACM, Inc. Posted by permission of ACM; the copies posted here may not be redistributed.

The slides from the ICSE 2002 presentation are also available:


Eric Eide <eeide@cs.utah.edu>
Last modified: Fri Jan 24 12:40:08 MST 2003