A Design Patterns Extension for the BlueJ IDE

摘要

Design patterns now have a strong influence on the design and development of object oriented software. It is therefore becoming increasingly important to teach patterns. In this paper we describe a tool, in the form of an extension to the BlueJ IDE, which has been developed to encapsulate knowledge of patterns in the IDE and to help students explore them and learn how to make use of them. The extension adds the capability to BlueJ to provide step-by-step construction of a pattern-based solution to a programming problem. We present technical details of the tool and describe an example of its use.