This is a practical book that tells you how to write Java programs using some of the most common design patterns. It is structured as a series of short chapters, each describing a design pattern and giving one or more complete, working, visual example programs that use that pattern. Each chapter also includes Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams illustrating how the classes interact.

This book is not a "companion" book to the well-known Design Patterns text [Gamma, 1995] by the "Gang of Four." Rather, it is a tutorial for people who want to learn what design patterns are about and how to use them in their work. You need not have read Design Patterns to gain from reading this book, but when you are done here you might want to read or reread that book to gain additional insights.

In this book, you will learn that design patterns are a common way to organize objects in your programs to make those programs easier to write and modify. You'll also see that by familiarizing yourself with these design patterns, you will gain a valuable vocabulary for discussing how your programs are constructed.

People come to appreciate design patterns in different ways—from the highly theoretical to the intensely practical—and when they finally see the greatpower of these patterns, they experience an "Aha!" moment. Usually this moment means that you suddenly had an internal picture of how that pattern can help you in your work.

In this book, we try to help you form that conceptual idea, or gestalt, by describing the pattern in as many ways as possible. The book is organized into six main sections:

For each pattern, we start with a brief verbal description and then build simple example programs. Each example is a visual program that you can run and examine so as to make the pattern as concrete as possible. All of the example programs and their variations are on the CD-ROM that accompanies this book. In that way, you can run them, change them, and see how the variations that you create work.

All of the programs are based on Java 1.2, and most use the JFC. If you haven't taken the time to learn how to use these classes, there is a tutorial covering the basics in Section 5 where we also discuss some of the patterns that they illustrate.

Since each of the examples consists of a number of Java files for each of the classes we use in that example, we also provide a Visual SlickEdit project file for each example and place each example in a separate subdirectory to prevent any confusion.

As you leaf through the book, you'll see screen shots of the programs we developed to illustrate the design patterns; these provide yet another way to reinforce your learning of these patterns. You'll also see UML diagrams of these programs that illustrate the interactions between classes in yet another way. UML diagrams are just simple box and arrow illustrations of classes and their inheritance structure, with the arrows pointing to parent classes and dotted arrows pointing to interfaces. If you are unfamiliar with UML, we provide a simple introduction in the first chapter.

Finally, since we used JVISION to create the UML diagrams in each chapter, we provide the original JVISION diagram files for each pattern as well, so you can use the demo version of JVISION included on the CD to play with them. We also include the free Linux version of JVISION.

When you finish this book, you'll be comfortable with the basics of design patterns and will be able to start using them in your day to day Java programming work.