POMA: A Pattern-Oriented and Model-Driven Architecture

Day-to-day experience suggests that it is not enough to approach a complex design armed with design tips, guidelines, and hints. Developers must also be able to use proven solutions emerging from the best design practices to solve new design challenges. Without these, the designer will not be able to properly apply guidelines or take full advantage of the power of technology, resulting in poor performance, poor scalability, and poor usability. Furthermore, the designer may “reinvent the wheel” when attempting to implement a design solution. A number of design problems continue to arise, such as: (1) decoupling the various aspects of interactive systems (for example, business logic, the UI, navigation, and information architecture; and (2) isolating platform specifics from the concerns common to all interactive systems. In the context of a proposal for a Pattern-Oriented and Model-Driven Architecture (POMA) for interactive systems, this paper identifies an extensive list of patterns categories, and types of models aimed at providing a pool of proven solutions to these problems. The models of patterns span several levels of abstraction, such as domain, task, dialog, presentation, and layout. The proposed POMA architecture illustrates how several individual models can be combined at different levels of abstraction into heterogeneous structures, which can then be used as building blocks in the development of interactive systems. First, we describe the architectural levels and the categories of patterns, as well as the various relationships between patterns; second, we propose five categories of models to address the problems described above which are associated with creating an interactive system. Third, we present the proposed POMA architecture. Fourth, we present a case study to illustrate and clarify the core ideas of our approach and its practical relevance.