Language-independent detection of object-oriented design patterns

✍ Scribed by Johan Fabry; Tom Mens

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 267 KB
• Volume: 30
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1477-8424
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cl.2003.09.002

✦ Synopsis

This paper shows that one can reason at a meta level about the structure of object-oriented source code in a language-independent way. To achieve this, we propose a language-independent meta-level interface to extract complex information about the structure of the source code. This approach is validated by deÿning a set of logic queries to detect object-oriented best practice patterns and design patterns in two di erent languages: Smalltalk and Java. The queries were applied to two similar medium-sized applications available for each language, and the results were conÿrmed by manually investigating the source code and available documentation.