Identification and Extraction of Design Pattern Information in Java Program

Instantiation information of the design pattern which exists in the design model is always lost in the program, so the comprehension and reversion of the program become very difficult. We have proposed an approach to identify the design pattern information based on Java annotations. This approach defines the meta model of the design pattern, and uses Java annotation technology to annotate these meta information in the program. Two typical applications of this approach are presented: (i) visualization of the pattern instantiation information in the program; (ii) automatic checking of the structural properties of the pattern instance. These two examples are used to illustrate this approach.