Sessions at Software Architect 2011 about Design Patterns on Wednesday 19th October

Design patterns do not exist splendid isolation. In the real world patterns overlap one another and interact in complex ways. This class takes a unique approach to teaching patterns by analysing a real computer program in terms of the patterns used to implement it.
We’ll look at how the design patterns are actually used in practice, and see how the strengths and weaknesses of the patterns play off one another. You’ll also get a chance to see how real-world realisations of the patterns can differ from the Gang-of-Four examples and how a given pattern can be implemented in various ways.
The examples are in Java, but C++ and C# programmers should have no problem following along. Some familiarity with the Gang-of-Four patterns is assumed, however (you should, at minimum, be able to identify them by name).

This session describes the current thinking about emergent design, discovering design in code. The hazard of Big Design Up Front in software is that you don’t yet know what you don’t know, and design decisions made too early are just speculations without facts. Emergent design techniques allow you to wait until the last responsible moment to make design decisions. This talk covers four areas: emergent design enablers, battling things that make emergent design hard, finding idiomatic patterns, and how to leverage the patterns you find. It includes both proactive (test-driven development) and reactive (refactoring, metrics, visualisations, tests) approaches to discovering design, and discusses the use of custom attributes, DSLs, and other techniques for utilising them. The goal of this talk is to provide nomenclature, strategies, and techniques for allowing design to emerge from projects as they proceed, keeping your code in sync with the problem domain.

The service pattern is pervasive – either operation centric (aka SOAP) or resource centric (aka REST). The security challenges are the same in both worlds – authentication, authorisation and secure communication. Common scenarios are direct authentication (like passwords or client certificates) as well as brokered authentication where the identity provider is external (at least to the application). This talk walks through those common scenarios and shows the architectural and technical approaches to design and implement those services in a secure fashion.

In this session we’ll look at a number of common mispractices and misconceptions that the speaker has seen in his 20 years of experience using design patterns. Together, we’ll examine them and look at fixes for them, so that, by the end of the session, you will no longer suck at design patterns. :-)