Patterns and Frameworks

Mobile computing empowers its users to exploit portable computation and context-aware communication, however; a mobile device lacks energy and performance to execute computation and memory intensive tasks. On the contrary, cloud computing exploits the 'pay-per-use' software and hardware services to provide virtually unlimited processing and storage resources. The unification of mobile and cloud computing as Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) enables mobility and context awareness with computation and storage services to provide systems that are portable, yet resource sufficient. In an architectural context for MCC systems that require context-awareness, mobility and scalability, etc., there is a need to capitalise on reusable solutions – utilising patterns and best practices – to architect and develop mobile cloud software. This research aims to build and exploit a catalogue of patterns that support reusable design knowledge for architecture-based development of the MCC systems. We have discovered some patterns as generic and reusable solutions and demonstrate their usage in the context of mobile cloud systems. The proposed research aims to establish the catalogue as patterns repository – facilitating a continuous discovery and documentation of new patterns overtime that support reusable knowledge and practices to develop MCC systems.

Frameworks are generic applications, described by a set of abstract classes and the way instances of their subclasses collaborate. They allow a rapid development of new applications through customization. However, two main problems are related to frameworks. First, designing a framework is a highly complex, time-consuming work and secondly, understanding the overall architecture and how to use it is difficult. One way to improve this situation is to include business and design patterns in the framework's architecture. Indeed, each pattern provides a concise and useful architectural guidance to a related problem. Moreover, the (re)use of patterns in software developments allows the integration of flexible modular adaptable well-engineered solutions at a higher level than classes. Business patterns are domain-specific patterns. Integrating these patterns into frameworks - both related to the same business - makes it possible to exploit the generic architecture of frameworks along...

We report on experience from teaching OO technology to undergraduate students. Before they can successfully tackle the projects we expect them to do in their second year they have to successfully shift to the OO paradigm, pick up a working knowledge of some OO language, learn and practice OOA and OOD, and get used to advanced ideas like patterns and frameworks.