Java Reference
In-Depth Information
16
WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?
The good—how design patterns can lead to success
➤
The bad—how overuse and misuse of design patterns can lead to
trouble
➤
And the ugly—how some “de‐facto” standards can lead to failure
➤
So far, this topic has covered many of the classical design patterns from the GoF
1
book as
well as some additional patterns that may i nd their way to becoming classics in the future.
This topic was written with the aim of being something that the authors would have bought
themselves if they had not written it.
As is true with everything in life, design patterns do not always do good. They can do harm as
well by leading you into implementing an anti‐pattern. This chapter focuses on the good, the
bad, and the ugly aspects of design patterns and hopefully provides a better approach for your
heavy arsenal of patterns.
THE GOOD: PATTERNS FOR SUCCESS
As has been mentioned many times before, design patterns are the collective wisdom and
experience of many smart developers. They unleash a great depth of experience that you can
utilize to solve many common problems that occur in software development. Even in the early
days of programming when using
goto
was considered legal (and acceptable), many projects
failed. One of the early important resources on software engineering and project management
was
The Mythical Man‐Month
written by Frederick Brooks while he was managing
development of OS360 for IBM.
2
Although the topic was published in 1975, it still addresses
