John Vlissides, an IBM researcher and the influential co-creator of design patterns, died on November 24 after a 19-month struggle with brain cancer.

To his colleagues around the world, he will be remembered as a member of the famed "Gang of Four," a group of developers who came up with design patterns as an innovative method of discovering common solutions to software design problems.

In Weblogs and e-mailed eulogies, Vlissides has been widely hailed over the past couple of weeks for being not just "a really swell guy" but the person who first suggested the ground-breaking Eclipse Project to IBM.

A long-time researcher at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorn, NY, Vlissides traveled the globe delivering lectures and advice about the use, benefits, and development of design patterns.

In the Design Patterns Project home page on IBM's Web site, design patterns are described as a way of documenting solutions to problems in pattern form, making it easier for developers to find specific information quickly.

The widely published Vlissides was the author of ; the co-author of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software; and the co-editor of Pattern Languages of Program Design 2, for example. He served at various times as a columnist for the C++ Report and Java Report and as a consulting editor for Addison-Wesley's Software Patterns Series.

Before joining IBM Research, Vlissides was a graduate student and post-doctoral scholar in the Computer Systems Lab at Stanford University.

While at Stanford, he co-developed InterViews, a set of libraries and tools for building graphical applications.

Vlissides leaves his wife Dru Ann and three children.

A memorial service will be held on December 8. In lieu of flowers, contributes may be made to his favorite charity: Children's Cancer Fund, CCF, P.O. Box 658, Millwood, NY 10546.