Patterns and pattern catalogs (pattern languages) have been proposed as a mechanism for re-use. Traditionally, patterns have been used to foster design re-use, and generative design patterns have been used to achieve both design and code re-use. In theory, a pattern catalog could be created and used to provide re-usable patterns within a project and across a group of related projects. This idea raises a natural question. How can we measure the effectiveness of a pattern catalog or compare the effectiveness of different pattern catalogs? In this paper, we define four metrics that can be used to measure the effectiveness of pattern catalogs. We illustrate these metrics by applying them to a case study that uses a pattern catalog of generative design patterns to generate scripting code for computer games. The metrics are general enough to assess any pattern catalog, independent of application domain or whether the patterns are generative or descriptive.

A practical problem faced by users of metacomputers and computational grids is: If my computation can move from one system to another, how can I ensure that my data will still be available to my computation? Depending on the level of software, technical, and administrative support available, a data grid or a distributed file system would be reasonable solutions. However, it is not always possible (or practical) to have a diverse group of systems administrators agree to adopt a common infrastructure to support remote data access. Yet, having transparent access to any remote data is an important, practical capability. We have developed the Trellis File System (Trellis FS) to allow programs to access data files on any file system and on any host on a network that can be named by a Secure Copy Locator (SCL) or a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Without requiring any new protocols or infrastructure, Trellis can be used on practically any POSIX-based system on the Internet. Read access, write access, sparse access, local caching of data, prefetching, and authentication are supported. Trellis is implemented as a user-level C library, which mimics the standard stream I/O functions, and is highly portable. Trellis is not a replacement for traditional file systems or data grids; it provides new capabilities by overlaying on top of other file systems, including grid-based file systems. And, by building upon an already-existing infrastructure (i.e., Secure Shell and Secure Copy), Trellis can be used in situations where a suitable data grid or distributed file system does not yet exist.