Inheritance is the primary means of reuse when you design an application with CA Plex. Inheriting from pre-built and pre-tested pattern libraries provides tremendous productivity and quality benefits.
Patterns are groups of CA Plex objects that are designed to be reused and customized. In this chapter, you inherit from the included pattern libraries. Additional pattern libraries are available from third-party vendors.
Patterns compared to Templates. The templates or frameworks supplied by other tools provide some of the benefits of patterns. Typically, a template provides a means of copying a predefined solution. Inheritance is not the same as copying. When an object inherits from an CA Plex pattern, the relationship is dynamic—changing a pattern automatically changes all the objects that inherit from the pattern.
Also note that patterns are created with CA Plex rather than being hard coded into the tool. You can customize a pattern library by creating your own patterns that inherit from the supplied patterns, or you can create your own patterns from scratch.
Patterns and Components. Patterns and components (such as COM and EJB components) are complementary technologies. CA Plex patterns can be used to combine and implement groups of components. Components are usually compared to the building blocks of a house. Extending this metaphor, you can think of patterns as the blueprint or plan for the house.
Like patterns, components are intended to maximize software reuse. Components cannot be changed, whereas patterns have an internal structure you can modify in certain places. Another distinction is that patterns are purely a design construct where components form a part of the running application.
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