Design Patterns Java™ Workbook

Beyond Ordinary Responsibility

Like developers, objects have certain responsibilities but in a different sense. Objects cannot bear a moral, ethical, or professional responsibility, but we do say that object-oriented development distributes responsibility to individual objects. This is primarily a way of characterizing encapsulation, the idea that an object works on its own data. Object-oriented development ordinarily distributes responsibility as far as it will go, meaning that each object does its own work.

Distributed responsibility is the norm, but several design patterns oppose this and move responsibility to an intermediary or to a particular object. A central figure may absorb certain responsibilities, or you may also need policies for ...