Easing Pattern Application by Means of Solution Languages

摘要

Patterns and pattern languages are a pervasive means to capture proven solutions for frequently recurring problems. They capture the expertise of domain specialists, as well as the essence of concrete solutions in an abstract and generic manner. These characteristics guarantee that patterns and pattern languages are applicable for many concrete use cases. However, due to this nature the knowledge about applying them to concrete problems at hand is lost during the authoring process. The lack of guidance on how to implement a pattern in a specific technical or environmental context leads to immense manual efforts and unnecessary reimplementations of already existing solutions. In our previous work, we presented the concept of linking concrete solutions to patterns in order to ease the pattern application. In this work, we extend this concept and present an approach to organize concrete solutions into Solution Languages, which are means to structure the solution space of a pattern language. We show how Solution Languages can be used to systematically collect specific implementation knowledge to purposefully navigate through a set of concrete solutions to ease and guide the realization of patterns. We validate the approach of Solution Languages in the domain of cloud application architecture and illustrate its technical feasibility by a wiki-based prototype.