Recently I have been learning about Design Patterns. I was specifically taught Strategic Patterns. It is a pattern that defines a family of algorithms, summarizes them, and then divides them up into understandable sections. In this type of pattern, there will always be at least one context connected to a strategy and a strategy connected to its subsections. This pattern also allows for choices in implementation which makes it perfect to have if your code needs to take any deviations due to a client. It is also good for anything that deals with a family of related algorithms, and anything that wants to avoid subclassing and conditional statements. This is good since conditional statements cause unnecessary nesting and put extra weight on the code and subclassing makes the code difficult to handle in the long run due to making it brittle. With this known, it is understandable why many utilize Strategic Patterns.
Now, I have demonstrated knowledge in strategic patterns but why stop there? There are many other pattern categories worth exploring.
To delve deeper into the topic, I used this website: https://sourcemaking.com/design_patterns
This website explains a few design patterns such as: Behavioral, Structural and Creational. It explains them in a beginner friendly manner, which is the main reason I chose it. It also defines what a Design Pattern is and the cons of using Design Patterns.
The first thing I learned about was Creational Design Patterns. This pattern focuses on class instantiation which allows you to use the blueprints defined by a class to create objects with specific states and behaviors. Let’s say you need to create a class that holds all existing employees. With class instantiation, you need to add is needed information such as name, email, department. Then, all you would need to do would be to give the employee attributes and the code would sort itself making sure that employee information would be sorted into the exact format you desire. In general, Creational Design Patterns specialize in making this a seamless process for your code.
The next thing I learned was Behavioral Design Patterns. It focuses on class objects’ communication. Sometimes one class needs information from another to initiate, terminate or do a specific task. Behavioral Design Patterns is designed for that. It possesses a chain of responsibility and makes sure each link in that chain runs smoothly. The code depends on it since if one class goes wrong, the others would follow.
To conclude, there are many ways to do Design Patterns. Each have their own purpose and specialties. It was interesting to learn about a few of them, and I wonder if I will have to utilize one in the future. Nevertheless, it was interesting to learn about.
From the blog My Journey through Comp Sci by Joanna Presume and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
