Peer Review

There are certainly a large number of links to other materials on patterns.

A number of the external links are not valid. On the page "Patterns and Pattern Languages", the links entitled "Systems Reengineering Patterns", "GOF UML models", "Links on Patterns in Delphi", "Class Object Pattern", "Patterns of Software Reuse", "Programmers' Canvas", "Software Patterns -- IAP'97", "Design of Business Information Systems", "Les Patrons et les Langages de Patrons", "Design Patterns for Avionics Control Systems", "An HTML 2.0 Pattern Language", and "Steve Berczuk", i.e. eleven out of thirty-one links on that page. In fact there are a number of bad links on almost every page I visited. For a site devoted to providing access to external sources of information these invalid links are a problem.

The FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section contains the reference "See To Kill a Singleton", but has no link attached to the text. Using the site's search tool to look for "kill AND singleton" gives four references, one of which is the FAQ page, another is a reference page to an invalid link, and the last two do not explain how to kill a singleton.

There is enough organization of material that students could use this site as a good start to locating material about software patterns and pattern languages.

The organization of the web sites links is a bit odd. The topmost link groupings are for the Hillside organization and a series of software conferences. The third set of links is entitled "Patterns" and links to sub-areas such as "FAQ", "Mailing Lists", and "Tools". The remaining link grouping is entitled "References", which still refers to patterns but contains a list of sub-areas with names distinct from that in the "Patterns" grouping. Given the various materials each one contains it is unclear why "References" is a separate grouping.

The search engine seems to search all pages directly associated with Hillside and its conferences only.

This web site uses frames and has a title frame running down the left side making navigation easy. Most external documents open in the same page but take up the entire page rather than being squeezed into the content frame.

The "Writing" section lists three different pattern templates that a user can save and use as a basis to write their own patterns. The web site suggests "Save the following pages as source from your WWW browser and fill in the blanks." These three template pages do not come up in their own page but rather come up inside the content frame, making saving their source just that much more difficult. It can certainly be done but there is no good reason to have these pages appear within a content frame and make the saving of their source just that much more difficult.