Steve Yegge's Property List Pattern Summary

Steve Yegge has written an article entitled The Universal Design Pattern in which he describes in detail the Property List Pattern [1]. The key design elements of this pattern (as he describes them) are:

• It has the basic methods of a Map (using Java's terminology): get, put, has, and remove.
• Keys are generally strings.
• It has a pointer to a parent property list so properties can be inherited and overridden. In particular, certain operations, such as get, are applied on a child, but if the property is not found there, it is applied to the parent.
• Reading a property returns the first value encountered for that property, from the child if it exists, otherwise from its ancestor.
• Writing (and deleting) a property on the child only changes the property list for that child. When deleting a property that is inherited, it must be flagged in the child as deleted, not actually deleted. Otherwise, all siblings and the parent will have the property deleted.
• Properties can have meta-properties. Common ones include information governing types and access control (such as "read-only").

Why would you want to use this pattern? Yegge mentions several reasons, including (1) it is very scalable, so it can be applied to single classes or used as part of a larger framework, and (2) it enables extensible systems. Yegge also describes several issues with this pattern, two of which struck home with me. The first is its performance may be unacceptable for some applications, although Yegge describes many optimizations that can be made. The second is that it is subject to data corruption. For example, incorrectly spelling a key and then adding data. References [1] Steve Yegge, The Universal Design Pattern, 2008