This course seeks to develop, for the experienced Java programmer, a strong, shared vocabulary of design patterns and best practices. The course begins with a discussion of how to recognize and apply design patterns – that is, how to incorporate pattern awareness into one’s own analysis, design, and implementation practices. The main body of the course focuses on the Gang of Four design patterns, with a chapter each on creational, behavioral, and structural patterns. Classroom time is about evenly split between discussion, group design exercises, and coding labs to reinforce finer points of important patterns.

This is not a patterns catalog: it is as much a study of how to “think in patterns” as it is an introduction to several of the most important patterns. Students will be challenged to bring their own previous development experience to the discussion, to see the patterns in everyday design and coding solutions. The course puts more emphasis on some patterns than others. We believe that students will be better served by going into a few patterns in depth, with lively discussions of several others, than by following a regular routine of discussion and examples over every GoF pattern.

The course software also includes an optional overlay of workspace and project files to support use of the Eclipse IDE in the classroom. (This requires that the instructor be experienced in use of Eclipse and able to walk students through basic tasks in the IDE.)

This revision of the course targets the 5.0 version of the Java language and Core API. Students with Java 1.4 experience should find all of the concepts and most of the example and lab code accessible. (A few examples that involve the Collections API are necessarily heavy on generic types, and this may require some additional support from the instructor.)

Java Training Learning Objectives

• Start to think in terms of design patterns.
• Recognize and apply patterns to specific software development problems.
• Use known patterns as a shared vocabulary in designing and discussing solutions.
• Use Factories and Singletons to control object creation, for a variety of reasons.
• Use Observers, Observables, and Model/View/Controller systems to decouple application behavior and preserve code scalability.
• Understand the full motivation for the Command pattern and take advantage of Command frameworks in JFC.
• Implement Adapters, rather than building redundant classes or creating intermediate data structures for consumption by existing code.
• Understand and apply a range of other J2SE and J2EE patterns to improve code quality and scalability, and to produce high-quality solutions right off the bat.