Professional C++

Chapter 26. Applying Design Patterns

The design pattern concept is a simple, but powerful, idea. Once you are able to recognize the recurring object-oriented interactions that occur in a program, finding an elegant solution becomes a matter of merely selecting the appropriate pattern to apply. You have already learned about one pattern in depth—the Iterator pattern, which is used heavily in the STL. This chapter describes several additional design patterns in detail and presents sample implementations.

Recall from Chapter 4 that design patterns are an emerging concept. Certain patterns go by different names or are subject to different interpretations. Any aspect of design is likely to provoke debate among programmers, and the authors believe that is a good thing. Don't simply accept these patterns as the only way to accomplish a task—draw on their approaches and ideas to refine them and form new patterns.

The patterns discussed in this chapter are:

• Singleton

• Factory

• Proxy

• Adapter

• Decorator

• Chain of Responsibility

• Observer/Listener

The Singleton Pattern

The singleton is one of the simplest design patterns. In English the word "singleton" means "one of a kind" or "individual." It has a similar meaning in programming. The singleton pattern is a strategy for enforcing the existence of exactly one instance of a class in a program. Applying the singleton pattern to a class guarantees that only one object of that class will ever be created. The singleton pattern also specifies that the one object ...