How many times have you viewed a website to stand in awe at the beautiful design, only to find that the code looks like the proverbial dog's dinner? A commonly held misconception is that appearance is the domain of the designer; this is not true, as the design of the code plays an equally important part as well.

How can we get around this? Easy, we can use a design pattern or a set of constructs that help provide a solution and allow us to concentrate more on the functionality we want to provide within our project.

First created in 1977 by the architect Christopher Alexander, engineers have since used the early principles and developed them into what we now know as design patterns. This work was further promoted by the Gang of Four (GoF) in their iconic book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, published in 1995.

They helped to not only push the use of design patterns further afield but also provided some design techniques and pitfalls...