iPad Application Development For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Using Design Patterns

When it comes to iPad app development, the UIKit framework does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. That’s all well and good, but working with that framework is a little more complicated than just letting it do its work. The framework is designed around certain programming paradigms, also known as design patterns. The design pattern is a model that your own code must be consistent with.

To understand how to take best advantage of the power of frameworks — or (better put), figuring out how the framework objects want to best use your code — you need to understand design patterns. If you don’t understand them or if you try to work around them because you’re sure that you have a “better” way of doing things, your job will actually end up being much more difficult. (Developing software can be hard enough, so making your job more difficult is definitely something you want to avoid.) Getting a handle on the basic design patterns that the framework uses (and expects) will help you develop an app that makes the best use of the framework. This means doing the least amount of work in the shortest amount of time.

The design patterns can help you to understand not only how to structure your code but also how the framework itself is structured. They describe relationships and interactions between classes or objects, as well as how responsibilities should be distributed among ...