Customer Reviews

SanFrancisco(TM) Design Patterns: Blueprints for Business Software

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I found the book very readable. Each pattern is presented in the style of the GoF book. Also, each comes with a sample implementation in Java. A pity is that these implementations are not found on the CD that comes with the book.

This book is definitely more readable then the GoF book. However, it is definitely not a book for beginners without prior understanding of the design patterns found in the GoF book. While the GoF is geared towards design patterns for O-O development, this book is aimed at design patterns for the development of business applications.

This book is good insights for developers even if they are not using the San Franciso product.

This is a very important book.

My previous reading experience on patterns has included the Design Patterns book (by the Gang of Four) and Analysis Patterns by Martin Fowler. I found this book to be more than just a fascinating fusion of the two. The creators of the IBM SanFrancisco framework have done an invaluable service for patterns users in general by providing a concrete and reusable reference implementation that demonstrates both the patterns and the interactions between patterns.

Make no mistake, there are definitely new patterns in this book. With some, it's easy to trace their origins to certain GoF patterns, but they still stand alone. Others are complex, sophisticated, and utterly new to mainstream patterns literature. This book is the essential patterns book of the year for anyone involved in the patterns community.

This is a book for any developer wishing to learn state of the art ways to cope with increasing features, flexibility, and dynamism in modern business systems. You don't need to touch SanFrancisco to get tremendous value from these authors.

The real benefit, I think, is that this book exposes a whole lot of what some would term "techniques that are deep down in the bag of tricks". Many of these patterns are definitely tried and tested. I have some of these patterns (Property Container, Policy, and Extensible Item, in particular) from past systems that I've built or studied. Some patterns are newer and more complex (such as Business Entity Lifecycle and Decoupled Processes), which are definitely worthy of further study.

I've read the book several times, and learn something new with each pass. It comes with my highest recommendation.

I was really looking forward to reading a book that offered a look at real-world implementations of design patterns. What I discovered in reading this book, however, was a bastardization of the seminal work by the GoF.

Bottom line, chapter after chapter of SFDP presents most of the basic design patterns, but implemented using non-type-safe code. It teaches the reader you can make extremely dynamic, reusable, and extensible software by using the Java Reflection API. For example, the Extensible Item design pattern shows you how to put method names in a config file so you can choose what operations you want to perform at runtime. Everything is configurable using String and Property objects. But at what cost?

This book often sights the "drawbacks" to using their implementations. But these aren't drawbacks. They are the reasons that most knowledgeable Java programmers cite when suggesting that reflection be only used as a last resort. Debugging, code maintenance, compile-time verification, ability to understand the application architecture, etc., not to mention performance, are all things that are compromised using reflection. And this book bases many of its conclusions on this flimsy platform.

SFDP does an injustice to object oriented design.