Formal specification of design patterns: a comparison

Summary form only given. Design patterns describe proven solutions to recurring problems. Reusing them yields better quality software within a reduced time frame. Most design patterns are specified in an informal fashion, which can give rise to ambiguity, limit tool support and may lead to incorrect usage. Thus, there is clearly a need for formally specifying design patterns. The main problem of existing formal approaches for specifying design patterns is lack of completeness. This is mainly due either because they were not originally conceived to specify design patterns and have been adapted to do so, or they tend to focus on specifying either the structural or behavioral aspect of design patterns but not both of them. We propose a simple yet balanced pattern specification language (BPSL) that is aimed to achieve equilibrium by specifying the structural as well as behavioral aspects of design patterns. This is achieved by combining two subsets of logic one from first order logic (FOL) and one from temporal logic of actions (TLA). Moreover BPSL can be used to formally specify pattern combination. We give a detailed description of BPSL and compare it with existing formal approaches for specifying design patterns in order to highlight its salient benefits.