The weakness of Design Patterns is that the mainline of code may be obscured. "Refactoring to Aspects" may prove to be a better alternative.

Five usability rules of thumb on how to design your API's.

Tim Bray has an interesting set of blogs that's keeping me on the edge. Tim is essentially saying that Java's immutable String class isn't suited for "heavyweight" text processing tasks. That's a big claim since there's just too many applications that require heavy text processing.