Meta Patterns - A Means For Capturing the Essentials of Reusable Object-Oriented Design

There is an undeniable demand to capture already proven and matured object-oriented design so that building reusable object-oriented software does not always have to start from scratch. The term design pattern emerged as buzzword that is associated as a means to meet that goal. Already existing approaches such as the catalog of design patterns of Erich Gamma et al. [5, 6] and Peter Coad’s object-oriented patterns [3] differ in the applied notation as well as the way of abstracting from specific application domains. This paper proposes a domain-independent terminology and notation we call meta patterns. It is demonstrated how meta patterns constitute a minimal means to capture reusable object-oriented design.