Analysis
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Evaluate design patterns side by side across intent, tradeoffs, languages, and integration fit.
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Analysis
Pattern comparison
Reviewing 3 patterns.
| Criteria | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Basics | |||
| Category | structural | structural | creational |
| Summary | Compose objects into tree structures to represent part-whole hierarchies and let clients work with individual and composite objects through the same interface. | — | — |
| Intent | Compose objects into tree structures to represent part-whole hierarchies and let clients work with individual and composite objects through the same interface. | Use sharing to support large numbers of fine-grained objects efficiently by separating shared intrinsic state from per-object extrinsic state. | Ensure a class has only one instance and provide a global access point to it. |
| Decision factors | |||
| Problem | A system needs to treat individual objects and groups of objects uniformly, but the hierarchy becomes difficult to manage with separate code paths. | A system creates a large number of similar objects, but storing all of their state separately uses too much memory. | A system needs exactly one shared instance of a class, and that instance must be globally accessible without allowing uncontrolled duplication. |
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| Integration notes | Composite is useful when a hierarchy of nested objects should expose a common interface, such as files and folders, menus and submenus, org charts, widget trees, or scene graphs. | Flyweight is useful when thousands or millions of similar objects need to be represented efficiently, such as trees, glyphs, tiles, or UI tokens. | Singleton is useful for centralized services like configuration, logging, caching, and shared application state. |