Architectural Patterns Revisited - A Pattern Language

Architectural patterns are a key concept in the field of software architecture: they offer well-established solutions to architectural problems, help to document the architectural design decisions, facilitate communication between stakeholders through a common vocabulary, and describe the quality attributes of a software system as forces. Regrettably, finding and applying the appropriate architectural patterns in practice still remains largely ad-hoc and unsystematic. This is due to the lack of consensus in the community with respect to the “philosophy” and granularity of architectural patterns, as well as the lack of a coherent pattern language. In this paper we attempt to establish common ground in the architectural patterns community by proposing a pattern language that acts as a superset of the existing architectural pattern collections and categorizations. This language is particularly focused on establishing the relationships between the patterns and performs a categorization based on the concept of “architectural views”.