Creational Design Pattern

Creational Design Pattern abstract the instantiation process. They help in making a system independent of how its objects are created, composed and represented.

Importance of Creational Design Patterns:

• A class creational Pattern uses inheritance to vary the class that’s instantiated, whereas an object creational pattern will delegate instantiation to another object.
• Creational patterns become important as systems evolve to depend more on object composition than class inheritance. As that happens, emphasis shifts away from hardcoding a fixed set of behaviors toward defining a smaller set of fundamental behaviors that can be composed into any number of more complex ones.
• Creating objects with particular behaviors requires more than simply instantiating a class.

When to use Creational Design Patterns

• Complex Object Creation: Use creational patterns when the process of creating an object is complex, involving multiple steps, or requires the configuration of various parameters.
• Promoting Reusability: Creational patterns promote object creation in a way that can be reused across different parts of the code or even in different projects, enhancing modularity and maintainability.
• Reducing Coupling: Creational patterns can help reduce the coupling between client code and the classes being instantiated, making the system more flexible and adaptable to changes.
• Singleton Requirements: Use the Singleton pattern when exactly one instance of a class is needed, providing a global point of access to that instance.
• Step-by-Step Construction: Builder pattern of creational design patterns is suitable when you need to construct a complex object step by step, allowing for the creation of different representations of the same object.

Advantages of Creational Design Patterns

• Flexibility and Adaptability: Creational patterns make it easier to introduce new types of objects or change the way objects are created without modifying existing client code. This enhances the system’s flexibility and adaptability to change.
• Reusability: By providing a standardized way to create objects, creational patterns promote code reuse across different parts of the application or even in different projects. This leads to more maintainable and scalable software.
• Centralized Control: Creational patterns, such as Singleton and Factory patterns, allow for centralized control over the instantiation process. This can be advantageous in managing resources, enforcing constraints, or ensuring a single point of access.
• Scalability: With creational patterns, it’s easier to scale and extend a system by adding new types of objects or introducing variations without causing major disruptions to the existing codebase.
• Promotion of Good Design Practices: Creational patterns often encourage adherence to good design principles such as abstraction, encapsulation, and the separation of concerns. This leads to cleaner, more maintainable code.

Disadvantages of Creational Design Patterns

• Increased Complexity: Introducing creational patterns can sometimes lead to increased complexity in the codebase, especially when dealing with a large number of classes, interfaces, and relationships.
• Overhead: Using certain creational patterns, such as the Abstract Factory or Prototype pattern, may introduce overhead due to the creation of a large number of classes and interfaces.
• Dependency on Patterns: Over-reliance on creational patterns can make the codebase dependent on a specific pattern, making it challenging to adapt to changes or switch to alternative solutions.
• Readability and Understanding: The use of certain creational patterns might make the code less readable and harder to understand, especially for developers who are not familiar with the specific pattern being employed.

Designing object-oriented software is hard, and designing reusable object-oriented software is even harder.

Christopher Alexander says, “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice”.

Even though Alexander was talking about patterns in buildings and towns, what he says is true about object-oriented design patterns.