Abstract Factory

• Provides an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying their concrete classes.
• Also known as “Kit”.
• Use abstract factory pattern when:
  • a system should be independent of how its products are created, composed, and represented.
  • a system should be configured with one of multiple families of products.
  • a family of related product objects is designed to be used together, and you need to enforce this constraint.
  • you want to provide a class library of products, and you want to reveal just their interfaces, not their implementations.

General Structure

Example

Pros/Cons

Pros ❤️

• It isolates concrete classes. Because a factory encapsulates the responsibility and the process of creating product objects, it isolates clients from implementation classes.
• It makes exchanging product families easy. The class of a concrete factory appears only once in an application—that is, where it’s instantiated. This makes it easy to change the concrete factory an application uses.
• It promotes consistency among products.

Cons 💔

• Supporting new kinds of products is difficult. Supporting new kinds of products requires extending the factory interface, which involves changing the AbstractFactory class and all of its subclasses.