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Subhrodip Mohanta
Subhrodip Mohanta

Posted on • Updated on

Factory Design Pattern

This is a Creational Design Pattern under Gang of Four

Also known as

  • Simple Factory
  • Static Factory Method

Intent

Providing a static method encapsulated in a class called factory, in order to hide the
implementation logic and makes client code focus on usage rather then initialization new objects.

Explanation

Real world example

Lets say we have a web application connected to SQLServer, but now we want to switch to Oracle. To
do so without modifying existing source code, we need to implements Simple Factory pattern, in
which a static method can be invoked to create connection to a given database.

Wikipedia says

Factory is an object for creating other objects – formally a factory is a function or method that
returns objects of a varying prototype or class.

Programmatic Example

We have an interface Car and two implementations Ford and Ferrari.

public interface Car {
  String getDescription();
}

public class Ford implements Car {

  static final String DESCRIPTION = "This is Ford.";

  @Override
  public String getDescription() {
    return DESCRIPTION;
  }
}

public class Ferrari implements Car {

  static final String DESCRIPTION = "This is Ferrari.";

  @Override
  public String getDescription() {
    return DESCRIPTION;
  }
}
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Enumeration above represents types of cars that we support (Ford and Ferrari).

public enum CarType {

  FORD(Ford::new), 
  FERRARI(Ferrari::new);

  private final Supplier<Car> constructor; 

  CarType(Supplier<Car> constructor) {
    this.constructor = constructor;
  }

  public Supplier<Car> getConstructor() {
    return this.constructor;
  }
}
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Then we have the static method getCar to create car objects encapsulated in the factory class
CarsFactory.

public class CarsFactory {

  public static Car getCar(CarType type) {
    return type.getConstructor().get();
  }
}
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Now on the client code we can create different types of cars using the factory class.

var car1 = CarsFactory.getCar(CarType.FORD);
var car2 = CarsFactory.getCar(CarType.FERRARI);
LOGGER.info(car1.getDescription());
LOGGER.info(car2.getDescription());
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Program output:

This is Ford.
This is Ferrari.
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Class Diagram

alt text

Applicability

Use the Simple Factory pattern when you only care about the creation of a object, not how to create
and manage it.

Pros

  • Allows keeping all objects creation in one place and avoid of spreading 'new' keyword across codebase.
  • Allows to write loosely coupled code. Some of its main advantages include better testability, easy-to-understand code, swappable components, scalability and isolated features.

Cons

  • The code becomes more complicated than it should be.

Real world examples

Related patterns


Code can be found here

Find out about more design patterns from here

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