Week 3

This week I've seen both the UoP students and the St Patricks students and given out the coursework to them all

Here in UoP we had a seminar looking at some of the material written by Richard Gabriel in his book Patterns of Software*. We had a good discussion about computing and patterns and then followed that up by looking at the Strategy pattern in some detail and an overview of Factory Method which we will come back to next week.

At St Patricks we concentrated on the coursework and I answered a wealth of questions about it. I also talked a little bit about the MVC pattern and about QWAN.

There is a huge range of material on the web about MVC (Model-View-Controller) including:

• Model-View-Controller from ootips
• Model View Controller from the WikiWikiWeb
• Model-view-controller from Wikipedia

One of the classic papers on MVC is that by Steve Burbeck originally written in 1987:

• Applications Programming in Smalltalk-80(TM): How to use Model-View-Controller(MVC)
• And for some history about the development of the MVC pattern try:
• MVC XEROX PARC 1978-79

For a discussion on QWAN, the Bead Game, symmetries, centers and carpets see: "The Bead Game, Rugs and Beauty" in Gabriel's book Patterns of Software (ibid) * . In addition Wikipedia gives a good overview of the concept of Quality Without a Name (QWAN).

And for something on the technical aspects of Qwan and pattern symmetries for software see James Coplien's symmetry papers at: http://users.rcn.com/jcoplien/bibliography.html

After my class at St Patricks Dr Sri gave me a copy of some of his lecture material and I will in the next few days add it into the PAFSD unit website.

* Gabriel, R.P., (1996) Patterns of software: Tales from the software community, Oxford University Press, ISBN: 0195121236 - also available to download from Richard Gabriel's web site Dreamsongs