Welcome to our repository on Design Patterns in Software Development! This README serves as an introductory guide to understanding what design patterns are and why they are crucial in software development.
Design patterns are typical solutions to commonly occurring problems in software design. They are like templates that can be applied to solve design problems in a consistent way. These patterns are not specific to any particular programming language or technology. Instead, they represent best practices used by experienced object-oriented software developers.
Design patterns can be categorized into three main groups:
- Creational Patterns: These patterns provide ways to instantiate single objects or groups of related objects.
- Structural Patterns: These patterns explain how to assemble objects and classes into larger structures, while keeping these structures flexible and efficient.
- Behavioral Patterns: These patterns are concerned with algorithms and the assignment of responsibilities between objects.
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Solve Problems Efficiently: Design patterns provide proven solutions to common problems faced during software development. Using these patterns helps to prevent issues that can cause major problems, and it also improves code readability for coders and architects familiar with the patterns.
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Promote Reusability: Design patterns provide a standard way to solve a recurring problem, which promotes reusability within and across projects.
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Facilitate Communication: Design patterns provide a standard terminology and are specific to particular scenarios. They improve communication among designers, and their use facilitates quick and efficient problem-solving.
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Improve Code Quality: Applying design patterns correctly leads to higher code quality, making it easier to understand and maintain. It also fosters best practices in software design.
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Enhance Flexibility: Many design patterns help to decouple the system, making it more flexible and easier to change and extend.
- Singleton: Ensures a class has only one instance and provides a global point of access to it.
- Factory Method: Defines an interface for creating an object but lets subclasses alter the type of objects that will be created.
- Abstract Factory: Provides an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying their concrete classes.
- Builder: Separates the construction of a complex object from its representation so that the same construction process can create different representations.
- Prototype: Creates new objects by copying an existing object, known as the prototype.
- Adapter: Allows objects with incompatible interfaces to collaborate.
- Bridge: Separates an object’s abstraction from its implementation so that the two can vary independently.
- Composite: Allows you to compose objects into tree structures and then work with these structures as if they were individual objects.
- Decorator: Lets you attach new behaviors to objects by placing these objects inside special wrapper objects that contain the behaviors.
- Facade: Provides a simplified interface to a library, a framework, or any other complex set of classes.
- Flyweight: Reduces the cost of creating and manipulating a large number of similar objects.
- Proxy: Lets you provide a substitute or placeholder for another object to control access to it.
- Chain of Responsibility: Lets you pass requests along a chain of handlers. Upon receiving a request, each handler decides either to process the request or to pass it to the next handler in the chain.
- Command: Turns a request into a stand-alone object that contains all information about the request.
- Interpreter: Defines a grammatical representation for a language and provides an interpreter to deal with this grammar.
- Iterator: Lets you traverse elements of a collection without exposing its underlying representation (list, stack, tree, etc.).
- Mediator: Reduces chaotic dependencies between objects. The pattern restricts direct communications between the objects and forces them to collaborate only via a mediator object.
- Memento: Lets you save and restore the previous state of an object without revealing the details of its implementation.
- Observer: Lets you define a subscription mechanism to notify multiple objects about any events that happen to the object they’re observing.
- State: Lets an object alter its behavior when its internal state changes. It appears as if the object changed its class.
- Strategy: Lets you define a family of algorithms, put each of them into a separate class, and make their objects interchangeable.
- Template Method: Defines the skeleton of an algorithm in the superclass but lets subclasses override specific steps of the algorithm without changing its structure.
- Visitor: Lets you separate algorithms from the objects on which they operate.