Patterns for encapsulating class trees

Abstract

Factory. Section 6 goes back to discuss the pattern form and what we have gained from using it. Section 7 summarizes the paper and presents some further conclusions. Object-oriented design firmly relies on abstract classes. They represent the key design decisions that structure a system in the large. An abstract class represents the interface to a whole class tree. This interface is often sufficient for clients to work with objects of the class tree. Only for selecting classes of the class tree and creating objects of them, concrete subclasses of the abstract class have to be named. If this is done by clients of the abstract class, they become dependent on the class tree's internal structure. Changes of class names and class tree structure force clients to be changed. Therefore, the class tree behind an abstract class should be hidden from all clients of that class. If a client's knowledge is restricted to the abstract class only, all dependencies on subclasses are cut. This has severa...

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