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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Conquering Fine-Grained Blends of Design Patterns

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description

The reuse of design patterns in realistic software systems is often a result of blending multiple pattern elements together rather than instantiating them in an isolated manner. The explicit description of pattern compositions is the key for (i) documenting the structure and the behavior of blended patterns and, (ii) more importantly, supporting the reuse of composite patterns across different software projects. In this context, this paper proposes a fine-grained composition language for describing varying blends of design patterns based on their structural and behavioural semantics. The reusability and expressiveness of the proposed language are assessed through its application to 32 compositions of GoF patterns recurrently appearing in three different case studies: the OpenOrb middleware, the JHotDraw and JUnit frameworks.