This week blog post is going to be about one of the creational design patterns, Factory Pattern. Factory pattern has many advantages:
- “Factory design pattern provides approach to code for interface rather than implementation.
- “Factory design pattern removes the instantiation of actual implementation classes from client code. Factory pattern makes our code more robust, less coupled and easy to extend. For example, we can easily change PC class implementation because client program is unaware of this.
- “Factory pattern provides abstraction between implementation and client classes through inheritance.
When we have a super class, which can be an (interface, abstract class, and concrete class) with many sub classes and we want to return one of the subclasses based on a specific input, this can be done with Factory Design. The benefit of factory design is that we don’t have to instantiate a class every time we want to use a class instead we can just call the Factory class.
For example, if we had an interface named Game System and we created more than one sub class that implements it (ps4, Xbox, and pc) and then we wanted to use one of those objects in a test class, we would have instantiated one of the sub class every time we created an object from the class. This way is very tedious, that’s why Factory design is so helpful. Instead creating a object every time, we can create an Game system factory which allows us to input for example enter a string name “ps4” and create a ps4 class instead creating for example GameSystem gs = new ps4(); every time.
I think factory design pattern should be used mostly every time if there are more than one sub classes just because it removes clutter and simplify the code to be more readable. From my personally experience I think factory design patter help me think more about organization when coding. I always think of ways to make my code more reusable after reading this article. All in all, Factory design pattern is very helpful and is an important method when it comes to Object oriented programming.
https://www.journaldev.com/1392/factory-design-pattern-in-java
Phan's CS 