Analysis
Compare patterns
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 | behavioral |
| 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. | Provide a surrogate or placeholder for another object to control access to it. | Separate an algorithm from the object structure it operates on by moving behavior into visitor objects. |
| 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 client needs to interact with an object indirectly because the real object may be expensive, sensitive, or remote. | You need to perform operations across a set of different object types without stuffing all the logic into the objects themselves. |
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| Practical fit | |||
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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. | Proxy is useful for lazy loading, access control, caching, logging, and remote service wrappers. | Visitor is useful for AST processing, reporting, cart calculations, and exporting object structures to alternate formats. |