Confessions of a Service-Oriented Abuser

1 MEET PAT TERNA BUSER " One comment I saw in a news group just after patterns started to become more popular was someone claiming that in a particular program they tried to use all 23 GoF patterns. They said they had failed, because they were only able to use 20. They hoped the client would call them again to come back again so maybe they could squeeze in the other 3. Trying to use all the patterns is a bad thing, because you will end up with synthetic designs—speculative designs that have flexibility that no one needs. " – Erich Gamma, and asked for help in getting over my abuse. To summarize my abuses, I applied patterns mercilessly to any software development project, and in fact came up with a " pattern " to abuse patterns – which ensured that I could apply almost every pattern (yes, I was disappointed that I could not apply all 23 as well) to the implementation of a single class hierarchy (I assume that you are familiar with the Gang of Four Patterns): • For a single class, I used the State pattern to implement the instance variables to facilitate flexibility in changing the behavior of the instance based on its state and the Stategy pattern to implement the methods to facilitate flexibility in the choice of algorithms. For the more complex methods, I used the Bridge pattern to ensure that the interface of the method was decoupled from the actual implementation, providing even greater flexibility. I used the Adaptor pattern to implement the interface defined by the class using existing legacy code. • For a grouping of instances of a class, I applied the Chain of Responsibilitiy pattern to facilitate the flexibility of allowing the handler of the request to be