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 | behavioral | behavioral |
| Summary | — | — | — |
| Intent | Use sharing to support large numbers of fine-grained objects efficiently by separating shared intrinsic state from per-object extrinsic state. | Allow an object to alter its behavior when its internal state changes by delegating state-specific behavior to separate state objects. | Define the skeleton of an algorithm in a base class and let subclasses override selected steps without changing the overall structure. |
| Decision factors | |||
| Problem | A system creates a large number of similar objects, but storing all of their state separately uses too much memory. | An object behaves differently depending on its internal state, and conditional logic is becoming hard to manage. | Several classes share the same algorithm structure, but some steps need to vary between implementations. |
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| Integration notes | Flyweight is useful when thousands or millions of similar objects need to be represented efficiently, such as trees, glyphs, tiles, or UI tokens. | State is useful for workflows, media players, order lifecycles, and any domain where behavior changes as the object moves through a lifecycle. | Template Method is useful when you have repeated workflows with a common sequence of steps, such as processing orders, generating reports, and importing data. |