[Sigia-l] storing pattern libraries

[Ziya Oz]

Austin Govella:

> Temporal/interactive aspects -- if I understand the question correctly
> -- would be handled by creating a separate "version" of that pattern.

My question was more pedestrian.

Eventually, you might end up having a sufficiently large number of patterns.
Management/versioning of these is a PITA, but there's even a worse problem:
browsing. 

People of various backgrounds: designers, IAs, developers, managers, etc
might browse the library. If the library contains non-static, interactive,
animated patterns how exactly do you let them browse items. They need to see
them in action. In fact, there may be subtle differences between two
versions that can only be really appreciated by observing and playing
directly, while having access to the metadata about the pattern at the same
time. Relying on humans to (manually) search, update and manage potentially
large number of these discrete items will become problematic.

IOW, presentation of non-static patterns + metadata becomes an issue without
an integrated HTML/OS renderer and automation. (I do understand one must
start somewhere. :-)

> We have dreams of pattern libraries for developers and more dreams for
> prototyping. As you mentioned earlier, such beasts have very different
> needs.

Yes, indeed. For instance, at the moment, I'm designing a rules engine that
will drive a huge enterprise system and all its screens. There are quite a
few commercials products out there, starting around $250,000 and going into
seven figures with enough customization. None has solved the issue of
presenting metadata and rules, plus myriad logic flow diagrams,
up/downstream impact graphs, parameters, etc in one place to the extent I'd
like. This is somewhat similar to the pattern library problem and its
inherent issues wrt versioning, presentation, storage, etc. So I've decided
to design one and gathered a team to developed it, as this system will have
several thousand rules as it grows.

Again, if you are already using Microsoft .NET and its various
apps/frameworks in your business and your name isn't Brett Taylor, I'd urge
people to consider the fairly tight integration/messaging mechanisms from
Visio through SharePoint and WCF to SQL Server to automate
management/versioning of such docs with visual presentations attached.

-- 
Ziya

It depends.
If it didn't, you'd be out of a job.