2001coots C. Dutchyn, P. Lu, D. Szafron, S. Bromling and W. Holst, Multi-Dispatch in the Java Virtual Machine: Design and Implementation, Proceedings of 6th Usenix Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS'2001), January 2001, San Antonio USA, pp. 77-92. (Best Student Paper Award) abstract or pdf.
Abstract:

A design pattern encapsulates the knowledge of object-oriented designers into re-usable artifacts. A design pattern is a descriptive device that fosters software design re-use. There are several reasons why design patterns are not used as generative constructs that support code re-use. The first reason is that design patterns describe a set of solutions to a family of related design problems and it is difficult to generate a single body of code that adequately solves each problem in the family. A second reason is that it is difficult to construct and edit generative design patterns. A third major impediment is the lack of a tool-independent representation. A common representation could lead to a shared repository to make more patterns available. In this paper we describe a new approach to generative design patterns that solves these three difficult problems.We illustrate this approach using tools called CO2P2S and Meta-CO2P2S, but our approach is tool-independent.