Two books I have include Design Patterns in their tittles, but neither actually deals with the kind of Design Patterns that GoF deals with. One is Jennifer Tidwell’s Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design (O’Reilly). In this book, different UI design patterns are discussed. The general patterns Tidwell examines are those found in everything from human behavior to UI interfaces. They include names like Safe Exploration (a human behavior pattern), One-window Drilldown, (information architecture) and Hub and Spoke (navigation). From the get-go, I don’t think that anyone ran out and bought Jennifer’s book thinking that they were going to be learning about the kinds of Design Patterns found in the Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides book.
Continue reading ‘More than one Design Pattern set’
Archive for June, 2007
Michael Baczynski has developed a package of common data structures useful for game development. However, their utility far exceeds game development and will come in very handy for application development based on design patterns. I came across this resource while searching for an AS3 hash table implementation. In addition to hash tables, the package contains ready to use structures for multi-dimensional arrays, queues, stacks, trees, heaps, graphs and vectors. The API docs are available as well.
I ran across the Flyweight design pattern when looking for a pattern that could be used to speed up placing objects on the stage in a Flash application using ActionScript 3.0. The Flyweight name implies a somewhat insignificant design pattern, but after working with it for a few months I found it to be both powerful and informative. It is powerful in that it is one pattern that actually speeds up operations, and it’s informative in that key OOP concepts are used and illuminated in it. It’s also one that has taken a while to really put together right—a process I’m still working on. Because this is a work in progress, I’d like to invite any and all developers with an interest in ActionScript 3.0 and design patterns to comment.
Continue reading ‘The ActionScript 3.0 Flyweight Saga: Part I’
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