Introduction

Some of the ideas proposed in this project are implemented now in the IBM's Eclipse project (independently, but much later). However, my project is based on a more solid theoretical ground, part of which is the Design Pattern Language.

This project was mainly influenced by the classical book by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides  "Design Patterns". It describes patterns for managing object creation, composing objects into larger structures, and coordinating control flow between objects.
The present project proposes the common patterns in the Grapical User Interfaces, suggests the language (named Pattern Language) to describe composition and control flow between those patterns and demonstrated many possible applications of this approach.

Both standalone application and web-application were built to demonstrate the proposition. These applications were based on the Java Beans architecture and were dynamically constructed on-the-fly given two models: Visual model (GUI patterns) and Domain model (objects representing the subject domain, such as database, graphical editor or HTML editor). At the end the "Pattern Language to Java Beans" compiler was created.

The project spanned more than four years and roughly consisted of the following milestones:

Project milestones

Quotations

To my mind, one of the most interesting extensions to the basic object model is the notion of active objects, objects with autonomous behavior.

Anton Eliens, Object-Oriented Software Development

The problem with software, other than being a medieval art form, is that everything we build today is monolithic.

Steve Mills, General Manager of Software IBM

General industry consensus is that the ultimate goal is to have component-based systems capable of operating in ditributed heterogeneous computing environments. 

Richard Barnwell, Architect Software 2000, Inc.

Objects have been freed from the shackles of a particular language or platform. Objects can be everywhere, working together and delivering a new world of opportunity to the next generation of system architectures. 

Martin Anderson, Chairman Integrated Objects.