Mastering Python Design Patterns - Second Edition

Other Creational Patterns

In the previous chapter, we covered a third creational pattern, that is, builder, which offers a nice way of creating the various parts of a complex object. Besides the factory method, the abstract factory, and the builder patterns covered so far, there are other creational patterns that are interesting to discuss, such as the prototype pattern and the singleton pattern.

What is the prototype pattern? The prototype pattern is useful when one needs to create objects based on an existing object by using a cloning technique.

As you may have guessed, the idea is to use a copy of that object's complete structure to produce the new object. We will see that this is almost natural in Python because we have a copy feature ...