Applied Design Patterns with Java

Creational :: Abstract Factory (87) {C ch 5}

Intent
Provide an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying their concrete classes.

Also Known As
Kit

Motivation
Different user interface look-and-feels define different appearances and behaviors for user interface "widgets" like scroll bars, windows, and buttons. To be portable across look-and-feel standards, an application should not hard-code its widgets for a particular look and feel.

Solve this problem by defining an abstract WidgetFactory class that declares an interface for creating each basic kind of widget.

• There's also an abstract class for each kind of widget, and concrete subclasses implement widgets for specific look-and-feel standards.
• WidgetFactory's interface has an operation that returns a new widget object for each abstract widget class.
• Clients call these operations to obtain widget instances, but clients aren't aware of the concrete classes they're using. Thus clients stay independent of the prevailing look and feel.
• A WidgetFactory also enforces dependencies between the concrete widget classes.

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