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Analysis
Pattern comparison
Reviewing 3 patterns.
| Criteria | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Basics | |||
| Category | creational | creational | behavioral |
| Summary | Provide an interface for creating families of related objects without specifying their concrete classes. | — | — |
| Intent | Provide an interface for creating families of related objects without specifying their concrete classes. | Define a creation method behind a common interface so specialized creators can decide which concrete product to instantiate without changing the surrounding workflow. | Provide a way to access elements of an aggregate sequentially while hiding the underlying representation. |
| Decision factors | |||
| Problem | Client code needs to create families of related objects, but hardcoding concrete classes makes the code rigid and hard to swap. | A workflow needs to create one of several related concrete objects, but constructing them directly in client code spreads creation logic and tightly couples the caller to specific implementations. | A collection needs to be traversed without exposing how it is stored internally. |
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| Integration notes | Abstract Factory is especially useful when your app must produce matching sets of related objects for a theme, provider, platform, or pipeline. | Factory Method is useful when framework hooks, integrations, or environment-specific workflows need to create interchangeable implementations behind a stable contract. | Iterator is useful for pagination, custom collections, ordered traversal, and any case where clients should not know the internal data structure. |