Presentations
These presentations describe a wrapper around a client C++ infrastructure library. The infrastructure was rather complicated, as it was a company-wide infrastructure that included a persistence layer, a shared cache, and a messaging component. The goal of a client infrastructure library was to hide most of the complexity from the users. This design not only made the infrastructure easier to use but also enabled it to be used with third-party libraries and legacy code.
This design was greatly influenced by the STL adapter classes, the reference classes from the IBM collection class library, and the Orbix TIE approach. In the External Polymorphism Pattern this design is cited as an independent discovery of a variant of the pattern.
These two presentations describe the same work but from different angles. The UP'97 (international conference on Using Patterns) presentation is more detail-oriented and with more code samples, while the COOTS'97 (Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies) presentation is more design oriented. The last sentence of the COOTS'97 presentation started heated debates, among participants in the debates were Bjarne Stroustrup, Scott Meyers, Doug Lea, Andrew Koenig.