Design Patterns Java™ Workbook

Image Proxies Reconsidered

At this point, you might ask whether design patterns have helped you. You faithfully implemented a pattern, and now you're looking at tearing it out. In fact, this is natural and healthy, although it appears more often in applied development than in books. An author, with the help of his or her reviewers, can rethink and replace an inferior design before any reader sees it. In practice, a design pattern can help you get an application running and can facilitate the discussion of your design. In the ImageIconProxy example at Oozinoz, the pattern has served its purpose, even though it is much simpler to achieve the effect you desire without a literal implementation of a proxy.

The ImageIcon class operates on an Image ...