Importance of Design Patterns in Software Engineering
When you want to build software, you need to learn a programming language and after some months, you will be able to make software. But building software you will surely face some problems. If the codebase is small it will be easy to manage and maintain. But what if the codebase grows? It will be so hard to maintain. Now here comes the concept of design patterns. A design pattern is the general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem. So if you want to follow the best practices while building software you must follow the design patterns. It can speed up the development process. When a new requirement comes or you need to change something from code, if your code is written by following any of the design patterns it is easier to customize.
We do not need to use every design pattern in our program. But we must know every design pattern so that we can use it according to our needs. Design patterns can be divided into three categories. Let’s discuss briefly them.
Creational Design Pattern: If you want to use various object creation mechanisms that will increase flexibility and reuse the code you must use the creational design pattern. Some of the creational design patterns are:
i) Factory Method
ii) Abstract Method
iii) Builder Method
iv) Prototype Method
v) Singleton Method
Structural Design Patterns: If you have two objects and the first object wants to use some of the features of the second object then the structural design pattern is used. Some of the Structural design patterns are:
i) Adapter
ii) Bridge
iii) Composite
iv) Decorator
v) Façade
vi) Flyweight
vii) Proxy
Behavioral Design Pattern: If you want to communicate between objects then the behavioral design pattern is used. Behavioral design patterns are concerned with algorithms and the assignment of responsibilities between objects. Some of the Structural design patterns are:
i) Chain of Responsibility
ii) Command
iii) Interpreter
iv) Mediator
v) Memento
vi) Null Object
vii) Observer
viii) State
ix) Strategy
x) Template method
xi) Visitor
In my next article, I will try to discuss about one by one design patterns.