Jim Carey

This month we'll look at pattern discovery in more detail by continuing to examine a business application pattern we discovered and documented. Our focus isn't on creating formal patterns, but on capturing, refining, and sharing the knowledge gained during development. We'll discuss the steps we went through as we discovered and captured our pattern. As we progress through the steps, we'll show you not only what we learned as we captured this pattern, but also things we learned as we captured other patterns. In Part 1 we identified the problem - managing configurable balance information in the area of warehouse management, and the candidate pattern - encapsulating the criteria for the balance information in the ProductBalanceMapKey class, as shown in Figure 1. Now we'll look at the refinement of the candidate pattern as we applied it to the problem of managing confi... (more)

Discovering and Documenting Business Application Patterns

Over the past two months, we've looked at the process of extracting a business application pattern from a series of business requirements. You've seen this pattern take shape, from its original form as a design meeting the specific needs of a particular business application (configurable product balance information) through an initial abstraction that was modified by other business requirements to reach its final form. In this article, the last of a three-part series, we'll look at applying the key pattern and cached balances pattern (with others) to the construction of applicati... (more)

Discovering and Documenting Business Application Patterns

You're probably saying to yourself, "Oh, no! Not another patterns article!" Technically, that's what this is. However, instead of simply showing you a finished pattern, we're going to look at pattern discovery. And, while what we'll talk about can help you capture fundamental patterns (that is, if there are any fundamental patterns left to be defined) we're going to focus on the capture of more workaday patterns. These are patterns that may be useful to only you and your team and might never be made into formal patterns or even shared outside of your group. In fact a pattern puri... (more)