Euro Plop Forward

This proceedings contains all papers from the EuroPLoP '97 conference, held at Kloster Irsee, a beautiful monastery located in Bavaria, Germany. EuroPLoP '97 is the second European conference on Pattern Languages of Programming. Its goal is to bring together pattern authors and enthusiasts to communicate and to present and review patterns in software design, development, and deployment.

EuroPLoP-just like its American counterpart PLoP-is not an ordinary computer science conference. Its focus and its program deliberately differ from most other conferences.

First, its subject matter is different in many respects. Pattern authors are asked to present proven and repeated practice and experience in software design, development, and deployment using the pattern form. Usually, this excludes late-breaking research results which are considered to be too immature for being written up in pattern form. From a technical point of view, a pattern is considered to be mature, if its author can show that it has been repeatedly applied in different preferably independent contexts, and that what he or she has written down as a pattern was the driv-ing force behind the concrete known problem solutions.

Second, the way it treats papers is different. Rather than standing up and giving talks, pattern authors gather in so-called writers' workshops. In such a workshop, a paper is not only presented, but also reviewed by the author's peers. The patterns community adopted the concept of writers' workshops from the poetry community as early as at its first gathering, the PLoP ¹94 conference. In a writers' workshop, authors try to help a pattern author with improving the contents and presentation of a paper. This process is described by Coplien, p. 245, in this proceedings.

The patterns community is evolving at a high speed. This also holds true for the way the EuroPLoP '97 paper selection process was organized. For the first time, a formal program committee was established which had to review submissions and decide about acceptance for the conference. The program committee relied on so-called "shepherds", experts in pattern writing, who worked with a submission' author to get it ready for a EuroPLoP workshop. The program com-mittee based its decisions upon the outcome of the author/shepherd work. In the majority of cases, the program committee followed the shepherd's recommendation on acceptance or rejection of a submission.

EuroPLoP '97 puts some emphasis on the integration of many different views. Not only did we ask for concrete pattern papers, but also for experience or research papers on patterns. These are submissions which either report on experience with using patterns or which present tools and techniques for making patterns work. These papers were subjected to a regular reviewing process as known from research conferences (rather than the shepherding process). However, research into patterns still seems to have a long way to go: At the end of the committee process exactly one paper was left that we could accept for the conference.

From an overall perspective, these proceedings are an intermediate step in pattern publishing. Pattern authors will use the feedback and experience they gain in a writers' workshop to further improve the contents and presentation of their patterns. The ultimate goal is to get the patterns ready for a publication that will be more widely read than this technical report. The primary publication example is Addison Wesley Longman's Software Patterns Series (SPS, formerly known as the PLoPD series). However, there are many other possibilities for further spreading pattern papers. In cooperation with John Vlissides, the SPS editor, we will make this proceedings available to potential book editors.

These are thrilling times. We are thinking new ways, we are conquering new territory, and we are comparing different cultures to make EuroPLoP a great event. Today, nobody knows for sure what works and what does not. But learning from these experiences is enormously rewarding and opens new horizons‹letting us go and see beyond where we could not go before.

Frank Buschmann (conference chair) and Dirk Riehle (program chair).

München and Zürich, June 1997.

Program committee

Bruce Anderson, Frank Buschmann, Erich Gamma, Robert Hanmer, Dirk Riehle.

Shepherds and reviewers

Kent Beck, Steve Berczuk, Kyle Brown, Jens Coldewey, James O. Coplien, Ward Cunningham, Jim Doble, Paul Dyson, Robert S. Hanmer, Neil B. Harrison, Tim Harrison, Ralph E. Johnson, Wolfgang Keller, Doug Lea, Kai-Uwe Mätzel, Gerard Meszaros, Jonathan Poole, António Rito da Silva, Hans Rohnert, Douglas C. Schmidt, Peter Sommerlad, André Weinand, Bobby Woolf, John Vlissides, Joseph Yoder.