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Design Patterns

Reference: YouTube Tutorial

  • Patterns will not generate ready code for us.
  • Instead, they provide us a template to follows.
  • They are a series of formalized best practices tested and verified by developers.

From the book: Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. Also called Gang of Four (GoF) book which categorises 23 design patterns into 3 groups:

  • Creational provides more flexibility in how the objects are actually created.
  • Structural deals with how Inheritance and Composition can be used to provide extra functionality.
  • Behavioral are about communication and assignment of responsibilities between our objects.

Index

Creational Design Patterns

Singleton

  • Only one instance of its kind exists.
  • Provides a single point of access to it from any other part of our application.
  • Encapsulates the attributes of an object in one single class.
  • getInstance() will return an already existing instance, or a new instance if not already initialized.
  • Code needs to be adapted to handle multiple threads.

Example: Database Object.

Factory Method

Real Life Scenario: Restaurant

Compared to Simple Factory Idiom technique, if we want to add more recipes to our menu, we will have to make changes to the createBurger() method. To fix this, we use the Factory Method Design Pattern

How?
  • Create a class whose sole responsibility is understood.
  • This loosens the coupling of a given code by separating the product's construction code from the code that uses this product.
When should we use it?
  • If we have no idea of the exact types of the objects our code will work with.
Limitation of Factory Method
  • What if we want to deliver our food, in an Italian way? This will again require us to pass the request object to the abstract createBurger method.
  • This means our code is again open for modification. Also, our code may break this way.
  • It also VIOLATES the OPEN-CLOSED Principle.

The next design pattern has the solution.

Abstract Factory

Real Life Scenario: Manufacturers and Products

Why Factory Method fails?
  • A single factory is not enough
  • Application Scalability

We should scale up the implementation to use the abstract factory design pattern.

What?
  • Allows us to produce families of related objects without specifying their concrete classes.
  • Forces us to explicitly declare interfaces for each distinct product we have.
  • Relies heavily on inheritance, so it delegates object creation to subclasses that implement the factory method.
  • Lets creator-subclasses decide which class to instantiate.
  • Makes it easy to extend the product construction code independently of the rest of the application.
  • Allows introducing new products without breaking existing code.
  • Follows Open Closed and Single Responsibility principles.
  • Centralizes the product creation code in one place in the program.
When should we use it?
  • When our code needs to work with various families of related products.
NOTE:

Many designs start by using the Factory Method pattern and later evolve towards an Abstract Factory design.

Example: We should have two interfaces each for Gpu and Monitor that a Company manufactures instead of using one common interface for all.

Builder

  • Lets us create complex objects on a step-by-step basis.
  • Produces different types and representations of an object using the same construction process.
  • Extracts the object construction or creation code out of its own class and move it to separate objects called builders.
  • Forces us to instantiate our object using the builder.
  • Separates the construction of ann object from its representation.
When should we use it?
  • When we may not need to fill all the fields of an object.

Director

Why?

Consider the shared similarities in the object calls for builder. For example, a Bugatti car can share few attributes with a Lambo car. We can extract all such common attributes separately.

What?
  • Defines the order in which we should call the construction steps so that we can reuse specific configurations of the products we are building.
  • Hides the details of the product construction from the client code.
NOTE
  • Client must create both the builder and the director.
  • Director is optional but handy.

Prototype

  • Delegates the object duplication or cloning process to the actual objects that are being cloned without coupling the creation of an object to its class.
  • Example: A car class may have private members which may create problems when creating deep copies of an object.
  • Also, there could be scenarios where we may not know which implementation of Vehicle interface to go for.
  • With the help of the clone() method, we not only decoupled the creation of the application logic from our class but also we gave access to our object's private fields.
What?
  • Will clone objects without coupling them to their concrete classes.
  • Will get rid of repeated initialization code.
How?
  • Design Prototype interface that contains clone() method that returns a hard copy of the object.
  • OR an abstract class with abstract clone method for subclasses to implement.
When should we use it?
  • When we don't want our code to depend on the concrete classes of the objects that we need to copy or duplicate.

Prototype Registry

  • To store frequently accessed prototypes.
  • A centralized place, a catalog for the prototypes you use and clone the most.
  • Typically, implemented as new factory class.

Behavioral Design Patterns

Chain of Responsibility

  • Transform particular behaviors into stand-alone objects called handlers.
  • Upon receiving a request, the request will pass along a chain of handlers where each decides either to:
    • Process the request, OR
    • Pass it to the next handler.
  • Allows us to Insert, Remove, or Reorder handlers dynamically.
  • Client may trigger any handler in the chain, not just the first one.
When should we use it?

When we encounter the need to execute several handlers in a particular order.

Command

Real Life Scenario: Smart Home Automation - Light Switching

Why do we need it?
  • Having an enormous number of subclasses increases the risk of breaking the code in any subclass everytime we modify the parent class.
  • Example: Bathroom class does not need automated switching but still has to extend the Room class. Parent class Room should not have the business logic for switching functionality.
  • Our app should give flexibility to remove this feature from the Bathroom class.
  • The invoked operation might need to be called from multiple places in our application.
  • Example: FloorLamp which is not a Room, cannot extend Room, hence needs to have it's own logic to switch lights.
  • However, several classes will call this logic and this violates the Single Responsibility principle.

This is solved by the Command Pattern.

  • Turns a request, or a behavior into a stand-alone object that contains everything about that request.
  • Encapsulates all the relevant information needed to perform an action or trigger an event so that this action can be reused by several parts of our application.
  • Opens a lot of interesting uses: such as passing commands as method arguments, storing them inside other objects or even switching commands at runtime.
  • Commands can be serialized, making it easy to write it to and read it from a file.
Advantage?
  • Possibilities for construction are endless.
  • Every class has its own responsibility now as we managed to decouple the classes that invoke operations from the classes that actually perform these operations.
  • The decisions, the assignments and the configuration of our program is now decided at runtime by the client giving him flexibility with what and how to do at hand.
Key Components:
  • Invoker (or Sender) responsible for initiating requests. It triggers the command instead of sending the request directly to the receiver (Rooms is our case)
  • Receiver contains business logic. In our example, the command we created was redirecting the call from the Room class to the Light class to inform to switch the lights. Because, the actual switching (actual business logic) is being done inside the Light class and not inside the command itself.

Template Method

Real Life Scenario: Game Loading Screen example.

  • Data loading from Disk Storage to RAM
  • Huge Multimedia games have to create way more objects than any actual app.
    • May also need to download external data.
    • May also need to delete temporary data
    • May also need to load previously saved profiles.
Challenge
  • We must create a single method that contains the business logic to load all the required components in a specific order.
  • But what if we need to create load() method for several other Games and then we may face some data transfer and objects creation which is common among few games.

Template Method solves such duplication issue in this case.

Why Template Method?

Defines the skeleton of an algorithm in the superclass but lets subclasses override specific steps of the algorithm without changing its structure.

How Template Method works?
  • Break down the algorithm into a series of methods.
  • Put a series of calls to these methods or steps inside a single template method (which in our case is load() method)
  • The steps may either be abstract, or have some default implementation inside the parent class.
  • To use the algorithm, the client must provide its own subclass and implement all abstract steps. If need arrives, override some of the optional ones but not the template method itself.

Mediator

Real Life Scenario: How do the Pilots know when to land the plane?

Solution: Air Traffic Controller (Mediator) - a single point of contact for all the planes.

What is Mediator Design Pattern?
  • Defines an object that encapsulates how a set of other objects interact with one another.
  • Restricts direct communications between objects and forces them to collaborate via a mediator hence reducing the dependencies between them.
Key Terminologies:
  • Components (Buttons / Labels / Text) fields in our app. They have a reference to the interface of the mediator allowing us to reuse this component in other programs.
  • Mediator Interface: The jop of this interface is to declare the methods in which the means of communication between our components is specified.
  • Concrete Mediators: Encapsulate relations between the various components they manage.
NOTE:

Components may pass any context as argument to the method (including their own object). However, this should be done in a way that NO COUPLING occurs between the receiving component and the sender's class.

Advantages:
  • Extracts all the relationships between your classes into a separate class.
  • Classes will:
    • be decoupled from one another.
    • communicate indirectly via the mediator.
  • Allows us to resuse any component in a different application.
  • It is easy to define new ways in which these components communicate by introducing new mediator classes.

Memento

Real Life Scenario: Undo in Text typing.

Solves the problem of Broken Encapsulation.

Solved by the concept of Nested classes to prevent data privacy.

What is Broken Encapsulation?

Objects invade the private space of other objects instead of letting these objects perform the actual action.

What is Memento Design Pattern?
  • Delegates creating the state snapshots to the actual owner of that state.
  • Hence, the original class can make the snapshots since it has full access to its own state.
  • Lets us save and restore the state of an object without revealing the details of its implementation.
NOTE:
  • It is the best practise to make the Memento Immutable and initialize it only once using the constructor.
Key Terminologies:
  • Originator (TextArea class): produces snapshots of its own state; restores its state from snapshots.
  • Memento (Inner class within originator): acts as a snapshot of the originator's state
  • Caretaker (Editor class): responsible for capturing and restoring the originator state.

Observer

Real Life Scenario: Subscription Mechanism (Customers can choose when and based on what to be notified!)

What?
  • Allows us to change or take action on a set of objects when and if the state of another object changes.
  • Notifies multiple objects, or subscribers, about any events that happen to the object they're observing, or publisher. This can be done even if the modifiable set of objects is unknown beforehand or changes dynamically.
Advantage:
  • Follows Open-Closed principle
  • Gives us the flexibility to introduce new subscriber classes without having to change the publisher's code, and vice versa if there's a publisher interface.
Key Terminologies:
  • Publisher (Store): lets new subscribers join and current subscribers leave.
  • Subscriber (Customer i.e. EventListener)
  • Concrete Subscriber (EmailListener / MobileAppListener)
  • Client (Main): Creates publisher and subscriber objects separately and registers the subscribers for publisher updates.

Strategy

Real Life Scenario: Integrating a Payment Service into Restaurant App

Challenge:

Application should be able to seamlessly integrate multiple payment options in the future.

  • We need to place each payment method in its own class making this class responsible for a particular payment strategy.
  • Additionally, these classes should be easily interchangeable by one another.
What?
  • Defines a family of algorithms, puts each of them in a separate class, and makes their objects interchangeable.
  • Applies the Single Responsibility and the Open-Closed Principle.
How?
  • Each strategy is isolated in a separate class, and we can easily introduce new strategies.
  • Strategies are easily replaceable and interchangeable by clients at runtime.
Key Terminologies:
  • Context (PaymentService): maintains a reference to a concrete strategy and communicates with it via the interface.
  • Strategy (Interface)
  • Concrete strategy

State

Real Life Scenario: Phone Actions (Home button, Power button)

What?
  • Finite-State Machine
    • At any given moment there's a finite number of states in which a program can be, and within any unique state the program behaves differently.
    • A state can switch the state of our program to another on or not switch it at all.
    • These switching rules, called transitions, are finite and predetermined.
  • Allows an object alter its behavior when its internal state changes.
  • Extracts each logic to a separate class and lets the context delegate the behavior to the corresponding state class.

How?

What is the object that changes states? (here Phone)

Key Terminologies:
  • Context class (Phone class): that stores a reference to its current concrete state (initialized as the initial state) to start with.
    • The context communicates with the state objects only via the State interface or the abstract class.
  • Interface or abstract class (State): declares the state-specific methods.
  • Concrete States (Off / Ready / Locked State): provide their own implementations for the state-specific methods.

State vs Strategy

State can be considered as an extension of Strategy as both patterns are based on composition, they change the behavior of the context by delegating some work to helper objects.

State Strategy
States can be dependent as you can easily jump from one state to another. Strategies are completely independent and unaware of each other.
The State pattern is about doing different things based on the state, hence the result may vary. The Strategy pattern is really about having different implementations that accomplish the same thing.

Iterator

Suppose we have a Graph data structure. We want to allow the users to travel the graph, but we also do not want to expose the underlying implementation of this graph. Traversal of this graph could be either:

  • Depth-First Search
  • Breadth-First Search
  • In-order traversal
  • Pre-order traversal
  • Post-order traversal

Now, the Iterator will traverse the graph according to the algorithm we picked regardless of the actual underlying implementation of this graph.

What?
  • Extracts the traversal behavior of a collection into a separate object called an iterator.
  • Traverses the elements of a collection without exposing its underlying representation.
  • Encapsulates all the traversal details (such as the current position and how many elements are left till the end).
Advantage:
  • Several iterators can go through the same collections at the same time independently of one another.
  • Reduces traversal code duplication.
  • Applies Single Responsibility and the Open-Closed principles.
  • Each iteration algorithm is extracted in a separate class, and new iterators can be added without modifying existing ones.

Visitor

Real Life Scenario: Client's Insurance Company

So, we extract the common behavior to a Client class and extend it to all the concrete classes (Company, Restaurant, etc). Now, lets say, we want to Add a Mailing functionality into the system. So that, depending on the client:

  • if Resident, then a medical insurance mail will be sent.
  • if Bank, then a theft insurance mail will be sent.

Going straightforward, adding abstract method sendMail() to the Client class and then overriding for the respective classes is fine.

Problem:
  • Violates Open-Closed principle and Single-Responsibility principle.
  • Each class has actual functionality that may break the code.
  • Each client's implementation is now open to modification and a single change delegates to all these classes.
Solution:

We need something that allows us to extract these behaviors outside the client classes on which they operate.

What?
  • Separates the algorithms or behaviors from the objects on which they operate and places them in a single class.
Advantage
  • Classes will be more focused on their main job hence enforcing the Single Responsibility Principle.
  • Applies the Open-Closed Principle as new visiting behaviors can be easily introduced without modifying existing ones.
  • Visitors are easily interchangeable by clients at runtime.
Double Dispatch

Since, the objects know (only) their own classes, we will have to typecast (or use instance of) to correctly call the required methods.

What?

  • Delegates choosing the proper method to the object itself instead of letting the client select a method.

Advantage:

  • New visiting behaviors can now be easily introduced!

Interpreter

Ref: YouTube Video

  • Almost never used.
  • Extremely useful when combined with Java Reflections techniques.
  • Used to convert one representation of data into another.

Real Life Scenario: Converion tool (one type of measurement to another)

Key Components:
  • Context contains the information that will be interpreted.
  • Expression, an abstract class that defines all the methods needed to perform the different conversions.
  • Terminal, concrete implementations of expressions that provide specific conversions on different types of data.

Structural Design Patterns

Adapter

Real Life Scenario: Zomato

Problem:

Previously application built using XML as the data exchange format. Now, in order to scale the application, modern frameworks use JSON as the data exchange format.

What?
  • Takes all of our XML data and transforms it to JSON making it compatible with the 3rd-party library we are making use of.
How?:
  • Allows objects with incompatible interfaces to collaborate with one another.
  • Uses both inheritance and composition principles by extending one of the objects and wrapping the second.
  • Translates client class into something that the wrapped service can understand.
  • Acts as a middle-layer class that server as a translator.
Advantage:
  • Applies the Single Responsibility and the Open-Closed principles.
  • Adapting behaviour is separated and we can introduce new adpaters without breaking existing code.

Bridge

Real Life Scenario: Pizza Delivery Business.

Problem

"The farther we go, the worse it gets". Pizza -> Pepperoni Pizza and VeggiePizza Our pizza business boomed and we found the need to have more pizzas:

  • AmericanVeggiePizza
  • ItalianVeggiePizza
  • AmericanPepperoniPizza
  • ItalianPepperoniPizza

Adding new pizza types and the ways of preparing these pizzas to the hierarchy will grow exponentially.

This Problem occurs because we are trying to extend the pizza class in two independent dimensions:

  • The type of the pizza.
  • The way we're preparing the pizza.
Solution
  • Bridge Design Pattern: Switch from Inheritance to Composition.
  • Adding composition:
public abstract class Restaurant  {
    
    // Pizza object is now added as an attribute (property)
    // to the newly created Restaurant class.
    // This will act as a bridge between the Pizza
    // and Restaurant classes.
    // With this approach, adding new pizza's will not require
    // to make any change in the Restaurant hierarchy and vice versa.
    protected Pizza pizza;
    
    // ...
}
How?
  • Splits a large class (or a set of closely related classes) into two separate hierarchies (abstraction and implementation) which can be developed independently of each other.
  • Client code won't be exposed to implementation details as it will only work with high-level abstraction.
Advantage:
  • Giving flexibility to the user to get their own choice of pizza, from their own favorite restaurant.
  • Applies the Single Responsibility and the Open-Closed Principles.
  • Independently introduce new abstractions and implementations; making it very easy to switch between them at runtime.
public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        AmericanRestaurant americanRestaurant = new AmericanRestaurant(new PepperoniPizza());
        americanRestaurant.deliver();

        ItalianRestaurant italianRestaurant = new ItalianRestaurant(new VeggiePizza());
        italianRestaurant.deliver();
    }
}
Key Components:
  • Abstraction (Restaurant):
    • provides high-level control logic
    • declares behaviors that rely on operations declared by the implementation.
  • Implementation (Pizza): declares the interface common for all concrete implementations.
  • Client: links the abstraction object with one of the implementation objects.

Composite

Real Life Scenario: Amazon's Delivery System.

Problem

Each box can contain several other smaller boxes and products too. Each such box can further contain even smaller boxes or products. Going for generic approach to find the total price for a single delivery can VIOLATE Single-Responsibility and Open-Closed principle. For such a scenario, we have to know many details beforehand.

The solution to these problem resides in applying the Composite Design Pattern.

What?
  • Composes objects into tree structures and then work with these structures as if they were individual structures.
  • It only works when the model and object's structures of our application can be represented as a tree.
How?
  • all elements share a common interface allowing the client to treat individual objects and components uniformly.
Advantage:
  • We need not care about the concrete classes of objects that compose the tree.
  • When we call a method, the objects themselves pass the requests down the tree.
  • Applies the OPEN-CLOSED principle. Introduce new element types into the application without breaking the existing code.
Key Components:
  • Component Interface (Box)
    • describes operations that are common to both the simple and complex elements of the tree.
  • Composite (CompositeBox)
    • has sub-elements but doesn't know the concrete classes of its children.
    • it works with all the sub-elements only via the Component interface.
  • Leaf (Book/Video Game)
    • basic elements of the tree that do not have children
  • Client works in the same way with both the complex and primitive objects of the tree via the component interface.

Decorator

Real Life Scenario: Notification service of Online Food Delivery Application

  • Delivery Departure/Arrival
  • Delivery Discounts
  • Receipt/Invoice etc.
Problem:

Having Inheritance based solution for this application can turn out to be disaster. Example: Suppose we have a Notifier Interface. Now, We can have EmailNotifier to begin with. Later, we added WhatsAppNotifier and FacebookNotifier as well. But, customer wants both WhatsApp and Facebook Notification at the same time.

Now, we cannot go and create WhatsAppAndFacebookNotifier to do this. This will exponentially increase the number of sub-classes.

  • FacebookAndSMSNotifier
  • WhatsAppAndSMSNotifier
  • WhatsAppAndFacebookAndSMSNotifier

The solution to prevent this mess is by following the DECORATOR Design Pattern

What?
  • Lets us attach new behaviors to an object by placing this object inside a special wrapper that contains these behaviors.
  • Wrappers forces us to use Composition instead of Inheritance.
How?
  • The advantage of Composition is that we can easily substitute our objects with one another because all of them belong to the same interface.
  • This allows us to change the behavior of the container at runtime.
  • An object can use the behavior of various classes; as it can reference multiple objects and can delegate them all kinds of work.
import designpattern.structural.decorator.INotifier;

public abstract class BaseNotifierDecorator implements INotifier {
  private final INotifier wrapped;
  // ...
  
  @Override
  public void send(String message) {
      wrapped.send(message);
  }
}
  • The rest of the code won't care whether we use the initial Notifier object or the decorated one.
  • Since, all decorators implement the same interface INotifier as does the BaseNotifier class
import designpattern.structural.decorator.FacebookDecorator;
import designpattern.structural.decorator.INotifier;
import designpattern.structural.decorator.WhatsAppDecorator;

public class Main {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    INotifier notifier = new FacebookDecorator(
            // The Wrapped object provided to the Facebook decorator
            // is itself a WhatsApp decorated one
            new WhatsAppDecorator(
                // but the wrapped object provided to the WhatsApp decorator
                // is a simple Notifier object.
                new Notifier("username")
        )
    );
    notifier.send("message");
  }
}
NOTE:

Debug notifier.send() and carefully observe the flow.

Key Components:
  • Component INotifer (the Interface): declares the common behaviors for both wrappers and wrapped objects.
  • Concrete Component Notifier
    • It's the wrapped class
    • It defines the basic behavior, which can be altered by decorators.
  • Base Decorator BaseNotifierDecorator (abstract notifier):
    • references the wrapped object via the interface.
    • so that it can reference both the concrete component (Notifier) and its decorators (FacebookDecorator/WhatsAppDecorator).
  • Concrete Decorators FacebookDecorator/WhatsAppDecorator
    • override the methods of the base decorator
    • but still makes use of it (using super).
  • Client (Main):
    • wraps components in layers of decorators
    • but must work via the component interface.
Summary
  • Wraps an existing object, allowing us to add a new functionality to that object without altering its structure.
    • assign extra behaviors to your object at runtime without breaking the code that uses that object.
  • Applies the Single Responsibility and Open-Closed principles.
    • each behavior is isolated in a separate class, and
    • gives us the ability to introduce new decorators without modifying existing classes.

Facade

Real Life Scenario: Buy/Sell Cryptocurrency App

Problem

Suppose we have used a third-party library CryptoService and of which we want to re-use the buyCurrency() method. We can re-use it as follows such that required parameters of the method are available:

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        CryptoFactory
                .getCryptoService("BTC")
                .buyCurrency(new User(), 1000);
    }
}
  • If this code was needed in other parts of our application, then the logic is open for Duplication.
  • Again, what if we apply the same approach for other library tools like sending emails.

This makes our business logic is tightly coupled to the implementation details of the third-party classes, and hard to comprehend and maintain.

Solution:

We need a centralized place:

  • to put all the logic inside it,
  • to center it, and
  • to restrict direct access to the inner workings of the library.
What?

Provides a simplified interface to a library, or a framework, or any other complex set of classes.

How?
  • Class that serves as a front-facing interface that marks complex underlying structural code.
  • Improves the readability and usability of a software library by hiding the interaction of its components.
  • Applies the Single-Responsibility principle.
  • Defines entry points to each level of a subsystem, thus decoupling multiple subsystems and forcing them to communicate only through facades.
Key Components:
  • Facade BuyCryptoFacade: provides convenient access to a particular point of the subsystem's functionality.
    • Sometimes, the facade can grow too big and become a God object.
    • In that case, we may require additional facades that shall old related methods.
  • Subsystem Class CryptoFactory/CryptoDatabase/BitcoinService
    • These classes aren't aware of the facade's existence,
    • they operate within the system and work with each other directly.
  • Client: Uses the facade instead of calling the subsystem objects directly.

Flyweight

Real Life Scenario: Revamp the Amazon UI Service section for Books.

Problem:
  • Application crashes due to insufficient memory error
  • Trying to create millions of copies of largely populated objects.
What?
  • Lets us fit more objects into the available RAM by **sharing common parts of state between multiple objects, instead of storing all of the data in each object individually.
  • Stop storing the state that rarely changes inside the object, but instead move it into a separate object.
  • The state stored inside a flyweight is called intrinsic.
How?
  • Find out properties common to the object (here BOOK_TYPES)
  • Other related properties may also be common thereafter (here distributor, otherData)
Context Book (Extrinsic-Mutable)
  • Contains the extrinsic state unique across all original objects.
  • When a context is paired with a flyweight object, it represents the full state of the original object.
Flyweight class BookType (Intrinsic-Immutable)
  • stores the intrinsic state of the object which is:
    • invariant context-independent
    • shareable and
    • never altered at runtime.
  • is immutable.
@Getter                 // immutability
@AllArgsConstructor     // all properties should exist
public class BookType {
  private final String type;
  private final String distributor;
  private final String otherData;
}
Flyweight Factory BookFactory
  • Returns the flyweight possibilities that we have.
  • Usually consists of a Map to get the shared values of our flyweight
  • Manages a pool of existing flyweights.
NOTE:

Flyweight Pattern is simply an Optimization, and before applying it, we need to make sure that our program suffers from the RAM consumption problem related to having a massive number of similar objects in memory at the same time.

Proxy

  • A proxy is an intermediary server that separates end-users with the websites that they browse.
  • All the Request-Response in the network happens through this proxy.
Applications
  • Firewall (Restricting access to certain users)
  • Filtering (Restricting access to a couple banned websites)
  • Caching (Storing recently/frequently accessed resources for faster retrieval)
  • Protection
  • Privacy
  • Security
Problem

Can we restrict the access to banned sites from the Internet class itself?

public class RealInternet implements Internet {
    @Override
    public void connectTo(String host) {
        if("banned.com".equals(host)) {
            System.out.println("Access Denied!");
            return;
        }
        System.out.println("Opened connection to " + host);
    }
}

This approach will turn the access down in the entire internet which we do not want.

Solution:

Introduce a Proxy Internet Server

What?
  • Provides a substitute for another object and controls access to that object,
  • allowing us to perform something before or after the request reaches the original object.
  • Applies Open-Closed Principle, as we can introduce new proxies without changing the service not the clients.
How?:

Implements the same interface as the original object.

Key Components:
  • ServiceInterface Internet/VideoDownloader
  • Service RealInternet/RealVideoDownloader
  • Proxy ProxyInternet/ProxyVideoDownloader
    • has a reference field that points to a service object.
    • after the proxy finishes the work it was intended to do, it passes the request to the service.
  • Client