Overview

Modern software development needs to address complex business requirements. It also needs to take into account factors such as future extensibility and maintainability. A good design of a software system is vital to accomplish these goals. Design patterns play an important role in such systems.

To understand design pattern, let’s consider below example −

• Every car’s design follows a basic design pattern, four wheels, steering wheel, the core drive system like accelerator-break-clutch, etc.

So, all things repeatedly built/ produced, shall inevitably follow a pattern in its design.. it cars, bicycle, pizza, atm machines, whatever…even your sofa bed.

Designs that have almost become standard way of coding some logic/mechanism/technique in software, hence come to be known as or studied as, Software Design Patterns.

Why is Design Pattern Important?

Benefits of using Design Patterns are −

• Helps you to solve common design problems through a proven approach.

• No ambiguity in the understanding as they are well documented.

• Reduce the overall development time.

• Helps you deal with future extensions and modifications with more ease than otherwise.

• May reduce errors in the system since they are proven solutions to common problems.

Classification of Design Patterns

The GoF (Gang of Four) design patterns are classified into three categories namely creational, structural and behavioral.

Creational Patterns

Creational design patterns separate the object creation logic from the rest of the system. Instead of you creating objects, creational patterns creates them for you. The creational patterns include Abstract Factory, Builder, Factory Method, Prototype and Singleton.

Creational Patterns are not commonly used in Python because of the dynamic nature of the language. Also language itself provide us with all the flexibility we need to create in a sufficient elegant fashion, we rarely need to implement anything on top, like singleton or Factory.

Also these patterns provide a way to create objects while hiding the creation logic, rather than instantiating objects directly using a new operator.

Structural Patterns

Sometimes instead of starting from scratch, you need to build larger structures by using an existing set of classes. That’s where structural class patterns use inheritance to build a new structure. Structural object patterns use composition/ aggregation to obtain a new functionality. Adapter, Bridge, Composite, Decorator, Façade, Flyweight and Proxy are Structural Patterns. They offers best ways to organize class hierarchy.

Behavioral Patterns

Behavioral patterns offers best ways of handling communication between objects. Patterns comes under this categories are: Visitor, Chain of responsibility, Command, Interpreter, Iterator, Mediator, Memento, Observer, State, Strategy and Template method are Behavioral Patterns.

Because they represent the behavior of a system, they are used generally to describe the functionality of software systems.

Commonly used Design Patterns

Singleton

It is one of the most controversial and famous of all design patterns. It is used in overly object-oriented languages, and is a vital part of traditional object-oriented programming.

The Singleton pattern is used for,

• When logging needs to be implemented. The logger instance is shared by all the components of the system.

• The configuration files is using this because cache of information needs to be maintained and shared by all the various components in the system.

• Managing a connection to a database.

Here is the UML diagram,

class Logger(object):
   def __new__(cls, *args, **kwargs):
      if not hasattr(cls, ''_logger''):
      cls._logger = super(Logger, cls).__new__(cls, *args, **kwargs)
return cls._logger

In this example, Logger is a Singleton.

When __new__ is called, it normally constructs a new instance of that class. When we override it, we first check if our singleton instance has been created or not. If not, we create it using a super call. Thus, whenever we call the constructor on Logger, we always get the exact same instance.

>>>
>>> obj1 = Logger()
>>> obj2 = Logger()
>>> obj1 == obj2
True
>>>
>>> obj1
<__main__.Logger object at 0x03224090>
>>> obj2
<__main__.Logger object at 0x03224090>