Design Patterns and Contracts is a thought-provoking guide to building design patterns to solve software engineering problems. Design patterns have gained widespread acceptance today because they capture the best practices of software design. Patterns offer optimized solutions to common design problems, reduce complexity by naming and defining abstractions, and provide a base for building reusable software. With Design Patterns and Contracts, object-oriented software practitioners have a new resource to help them further exploit the power of design patterns. This book introduces the fundamentals of software contracts and illustrates how Design by Contract contributes to the optimal use of design patterns in a quality-oriented software engineering process. The Design by Contract approach to software construction provides a methodological guideline for building systems that are robust, modular, and simple. Readers will find value in the bookis overview of the Object Constraint Language, a precise modeling language that allows Design by Contract to be used with the industry standard Unified Modeling Language (UML). Although written in Eiffel, this book makes an excellent companion for developers who are using languages such as Java and UML. Throughout the book the authors discuss specific implementation issues and provide complete, ready-to-be-compiled examples of the use of each pattern. They introduce design patterns and Design by Contract in the context of software engineering, and show how these tools are used to guide and document system design. 0201309599B04062001