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 | behavioral | behavioral | creational |
| Summary | — | — | — |
| Intent | Provide a way to access elements of an aggregate sequentially while hiding the underlying representation. | Capture and externalize an object's state so it can be restored to a previous point in time. | Specify the kinds of objects to create using a prototypical instance, and create new objects by cloning that prototype. |
| Decision factors | |||
| Problem | A collection needs to be traversed without exposing how it is stored internally. | An object's internal state must be saved and restored later without exposing its implementation details. | Creating new objects from scratch can be expensive or repetitive when the system needs many similar variants. |
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| Integration notes | Iterator is useful for pagination, custom collections, ordered traversal, and any case where clients should not know the internal data structure. | Memento is useful for undo/redo, checkpoints, draft recovery, and any workflow where state history matters. | Prototype is useful when object creation is expensive, when many near-identical objects are needed, or when cloning preconfigured templates is simpler than rebuilding them. |