Honestly, the two patterns are pretty similar in practice, and the defining difference between them tends to vary depending on who you ask. Some popular choices are: States store a reference to the context object that contains them. Strategies do not. States are allowed to replace themselves (IE: to change the state of the context … Read more
There’s a book in Martin Fowler’s Signature Series called Refactoring Databases. That provides a list of techniques for refactoring databases. I can’t say I’ve heard a list of database patterns so much. I would also highly recommend David C. Hay’s Data Model Patterns and the follow up A Metadata Map which builds on the first … Read more
I like thinking about design pattens in terms of my classes being ‘people,’ and the patterns are the ways that the people talk to each other. So, to me the factory pattern is like a hiring agency. You’ve got someone that will need a variable number of workers. This person may know some info they … Read more
I’m not very familiar with the Visitor pattern. Let’s see if I got it right. Suppose you have a hierarchy of animals class Animal { }; class Dog: public Animal { }; class Cat: public Animal { }; (Suppose it is a complex hierarchy with a well-established interface.) Now we want to add a new … Read more
A couple of points: DI increases complexity, usually by increasing the number of classes since responsibilities are separated more, which is not always beneficial Your code will be (somewhat) coupled to the dependency injection framework you use (or more generally how you decide to implement the DI pattern) DI containers or approaches that perform type … Read more
The difference may seem slight, but even with the ServiceLocator, the class is still responsible for creating its dependencies. It just uses the service locator to do it. With DI, the class is given its dependencies. It neither knows, nor cares where they come from. One important result of this is that the DI example … Read more
I read three books and still did not understand patterns very well until I read Head First Design Patterns by OReilly. This book opened my eyes and really explained well.
Proxy, Decorator, Adapter, and Bridge are all variations on “wrapping” a class. But their uses are different. Proxy could be used when you want to lazy-instantiate an object, or hide the fact that you’re calling a remote service, or control access to the object. Decorator is also called “Smart Proxy.” This is used when you … Read more
With the Factory pattern, you produce instances of implementations (Apple, Banana, Cherry, etc.) of a particular interface — say, IFruit. With the Abstract Factory pattern, you provide a way for anyone to provide their own factory. This allows your warehouse to be either an IFruitFactory or an IJuiceFactory, without requiring your warehouse to know anything … Read more
On my quest for the truth I discovered that there are actually very few “acceptable” reasons to use a Singleton. One reason that tends to come up over and over again on the internets is that of a “logging” class (which you mentioned). In this case, a Singleton can be used instead of a single … Read more