Thursday, 25 January 2007

Article: Learn the Basics of Abstract Factory Classes in PHP 5

He says, abstract factory classes can be used instead of concrete factory class that will allow creating correct objects according to the context in a PHP application.

He explains when the abstract factory pattern is applied, there's an abstract factory class that defines the type of objects that will be created by the corresponding concrete factories (in other words, non-abstract). On its side, a concrete factory class is responsible for spawning the correct kind of objects that correspond to its context. This implies that, if an application uses multiple contexts, the non-abstract factory always will return to client code an object that conforms to the expectations of a given instance.

If the above sounds confusing, Alejandro attempts to give examples to facilitate better understanding. He introduces the article by defining an abstract factory class aimed at creating generic web page elements with instances.