Builds on the factory pattern.
It is creational design pattern that provides an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying their concrete classes.
- Abstract Factory Interface: Declares methods for creating a set of related or dependent objects.
- Concrete Factories: Implement the Abstract Factory interface to produce family-specific objects.
- Abstract Products: Declare interfaces for different product types.
- Concrete Products: Implement the Abstract Product interfaces.
- Client Code: Uses the Abstract Factory and Abstract Products. It does not know the specifics of the Concrete Factories or Products, enabling easy extension and scalability.
Factory pattern creates objects of one product type while Abstract Factory Pattern creates families of related objects of different product types.
Family: A family refers to a group of related products (e.g., PostgreSQL's connection and CRUD operations or MongoDB's connection and CRUD operations).
Product: A product is an individual entity in the family (e.g., DatabaseConnection or CRUDOperations).
- Suppose you are building a data access layer for an application. This layer must support multiple databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL. The layer needs to handle db connection and CRUD operators.
- In UI development, this pattern allows you to create entire sets of components (buttons, inputs, modals) that share a consistent theme or style.